Yahoo Kidnaps High Res Photos

from the pay-us-and-we'll-set-them-free dept

One thing that sites should learn is that when you want to add some sort of "paid" component to a site, doing so in a way that takes something away from users is never a good idea. You can try to charge for adding additional features - but taking away stuff is only going to anger people, especially if they signed up for some of the formerly free features. Yahoo's latest move has angered a number of people. In adjusting the terms of their online photo hosting they did one nice thing (eliminating storage limits) and one not so nice thing (saying you need to pay if you want to access any photo with a higher resolution than 480 by 360). This is especially problematic because many people had already stored such "high res" (and, no, that's not particularly high res) photos on the site which are now locked behind a pay wall. Yahoo claims that they've been warning people about the impending changes for months - but their method of warning people is pretty questionable. They put up banner ads telling users the terms of service were changing. Banner ads? Those things that almost no one looks at any more? Not the most effective way to get the word out there, and many people say they never saw the banner ad, and suddenly no longer have access to the photos they thought they were storing for free.

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