[extropy-chat] The economice of Gmail, etc.

[Dan Clemmensen]

Mike Lorrey wrote:

>Cost of the drives isn't what opportunity cost is about. Opportunity
>cost is what opportunities are foregone because of a choice or event.
>In respect to this situation, a mail service offering 10 gigs of space
>would attract more users than one that offers 250 megs of space. This
>reduces the ability of the mail server to sell ad space etc.
>  
>
I think you didn't do the math. The raw disk cost to provide 1GByte is 
only fifty cents. The full-up cost (computer, rackspace, etc) doubles 
that to a dollar, but the average user's space is far less than half 
full, so we are below fifty cents per user. This number is falling with
time because the cost of new disk space is dropping faster than the 
mailboxes are filling.

>Spam today represents as much as 85% of all e-mail sent and received,
>according to the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union, up from
>approximately 35% just one year ago. Spam is a true global phenomenon,
>not limited to the U.S. If an e-mail address exists, sooner or later
>the spammers will find it. 
>
>What this means is that the the incremental cost to yahoo for each real
>message I receive is six times larger than it should be. This means
>that they need to charge six times as much for the ads that appear on
>the pages my browser loads than they would otherwise, they make six
>times less profit, or offer me six times less features to me, their
>user, or a combination of all three. Essentially spam is sucking all
>the profit out of the dot com industry and is directing it to the
>owners of bandwidth, who get paid whether the bandwidth is used by me
>or by spammers.
>  
>
That's not how it works. The mail volume per customer is a trivial 
percentage is of Yahoo's cost per customer. Incidentally, Yahoo does 
have a critically important reason to fight spam. Spam will drive 
customers away from e-mail to alternatives such as blogging, thus reducing
the ad clicks. This is a truly major problem for them.