Yahoo Launch two new Domains
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Yahoo has launched two new domain names, rocketmail.com and ymail.com as options for personalised e-mail addresses.
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With 266 million active e-mail accounts, Yahoo is the worlds largest e-mail service. The company is hoping the new domains will give users more selections for simple and more memorable addresses that may already be taken on the primary yahoo.com domain.
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The decision to add the new domains came about because Yahoo found that more and more users were complaining about not being able to get the address they wanted.
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John Kremer, Yahoo Mail?s vice-president, shed some light on the issue: “You add it all together and you’ve got a pretty remote chance of finding something you’re not going have to append a number onto. This addition of the two new domains will effectively triple the name space,” he said.
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After a few months analysing customer feedback, Yahoo decided to go with ymail.com ? the brand used for Yahoo Mail on mobile devices ? and rocketmail.com, a name that his historical significance to the company.
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“It’s kind of a hip and retro e-mail name for us here,” Kremer explained.
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Back in 1997 Rocketmail was a service owned by a company called ?411?. Yahoo acquired them when they launched. The domain has lain mostly dormant since that time with only a few users still holding an account.
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“We’ve owned these domains for quite some time. The majority [of our users] really wanted to use these two domains and already associated them in some way, shape or form with Yahoo,” Kremer noted.
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Although the expansion offers Yahoo?s users more options, critics are quick to claim it will shift focus from the Yahoo brand.
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“The people who offer free e-mail do so specifically for one reason: to garner brand awareness for their domain name,” Barb Rechterman, executive vice-president of GoDaddy, said. “Now Yahoo launches these two new ones and all its doing is diluting away from the Yahoo brand. I’m not quite sure what value that subsequently brings to Yahoo other than perhaps they get to say that they provide more e-mail addresses,” she said.
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The added domains will likely cause ea headache for Yahoo?s marketing department, now that they essentially have three brands to market.
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“There’s the question of what are you going to do with the ‘rocket’ brand — how are you going to make that sub-brand do anything particular for you that’s not going to be done as well or better by the master brand?” Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, said. “You have to spend money turning it into something people care about. Since it doesn’t do anything distinctly different from Yahoo, why would you spend that money rather than doing something more with the master brand?” he asked.
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Yahoo executives are taking this in to account however and believe the added user benefit will, in the long run, pay off.
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“We love having people have Yahoo accounts and Yahoo names because that, in a way, advertises our service to everybody they communicate with,” Yahoo’s Kremer told said. “There was a hesitation to expand the namespace, [but] the level of customers complaining in our surveys got to a point where we said we need to make this happen.”
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