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In the course of rating the visual voicemail services available for BlackBerry, we performed a thorough experiment with YouMail. I wasn’t overly impressed by the service, but it’s free, and that counts for a lot. However, the totally free business model has come to an end, and YouMail will include ads in email alerts and SMS. Will this change how you view the YouMail service?
When monetizing a service, two models immediately come to mind. First is the subscription model, whereby users pay directly for the service. The second is ad-supported, whereby users are annoyed by advertisements, but gain the benefit of a free service. YouMail is going for a hybrid model here. They’ll send along ads with their email notifications, but you can pay to have them removed.
For $1.99 per month of $19.99 per year, you can strip YouMail of advertisements. Is this worth it? Until I see what kind of ads they’re running, it’s tough to tell. The campaign begins on February 7th, so we’ll have a better idea at that point. It’s nice that YouMail continues to provide its users a free service. Will the ads make it a nuisance? We’ll see soon enough.
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2 Comments ↓
From the start, YouMail wasn’t worth it to me. I used their process to request that they not send SMS updates to me, which they continued to do, and “support” was unconscionably rude about it when I called.
IIRC, there was also a T-Mobile surcharge involved in forwarding your voicemail to YouMail, but I could be thinking of another of these services.
Either way, the fact that they’re ad-spamming is just another nail in a coffin that’s otherwise nailed tightly shut.
[...] visual voice application not worth it It was barely a week ago that we gave an update on YouMail’s service. Since then they’ve made another improvement: an application for your BlackBerry. [...]
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