Recently, Yahoo! through its subsidiary Geocities has begun charging users for the rate of data transfer occurring on their websites. If you have a popular website which you have spent hours preparing and spreading the word about, you are likely to receive the following notice:
| Dear GeoCities Member,
Congratulations, http://www.geocities.com/yourpagename seems to
be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic.
Our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount
of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes
per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the
past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the
bandwidth within this limit.
What can I do?
Keep in mind that large files such as images and multimedia files
can effect your data transfer greatly. A single web page that
contains 200,000 bytes of images will only be able to be viewed
about 20-25 times an hour. By keeping your file sizes and page
sizes as small as possible, you can maximize the amount of page views
your site can produce.
You can also upgrade your site to one of our new premium services,
GeoCities Pro or GeoCities Webmaster. These packages allow for 10 and
20 gigabytes of data transfer per month, and also give you the option of
purchasing unlimited data transfer so your site will always be accessible.
These packages also enable you to run an ad-free site at your own
domain name (for example, www.yourpagename.com) AND get matching email
accounts at that domain (like you@yourpagename.com).
For more information about our new packages, please visit
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info3
Upgrading your current GeoCities site to one of our new premium packages
is simple. You don't have to move ANY of your files, and your current
GeoCities web address will continue to work in addition to your domain.
If you'd prefer not to receive this notice in the future, just go to
http://geocities.yahoo.com/opt/bwemail to take your name off of the notify
list. Of course, our servers will continue to monitor your site's data
usage and turn it off if it exceeds the limits.
Thank you,
Yahoo! GeoCities
http://geocities.yahoo.com/
|
Take a good look at how they say they are calculating your data transfer rate. They base it on an hourly projection of traffic. So, let's say you sudden have an influx of visitors tomorrow after telling all your friends, family, and fellow employees in e-mail about your newly updated webpage. The data transfer for the single hour during which they all received the notice and clicked the link to check it out becomes the standard from which the rest of your transfer usage is projected through the end of the month. If that exceeds 3 gigabytes, your site which you just told everyone to visit is suddenly turned off, leaving the friends who didn't get in during that hour wondering what the heck you were talking about. Do you look foolish?
According to the guidelines they are suggesting, this page which you are currently reading is too large. We think that's just plain bullshit. There's no other word for it. They use at least part of the space they suggest is "free" in order to advertise products and services that keep them in business. Now, they want to charge us for being sufficiently competent in our presentation and use of that space as to increase traffic thereby bringing in more potential customers to see their ads through an access fee. In essense, it is like being charged for the amount of junk mail you receive by a mail provider who insists that you must receive special offers junk mail to use their service. Come to think of it, Yahoo! already does this in part.
Why am I so upset? In the old days, before Yahoo! acquired Geocities, they seemed to recognize the value of good web design. Indeed, they had a program called GeoRewards. Traffic to your website transfered into points which you could spend on software, extra webspace, and other merchandise that spread the Geocities logo. Outstanding traffic was rewarded with a notice in the monthly GeoWorld Report. It created an incentive to maintain some standards of good design, creativity, and function. The entire program went out the window altogether the day Yahoo! took over. But no one ever expected that instead of being rewarded for bringing people to your page, you would one day be punished for it.
In any event, to the above letter, we wrote the following response:
| We used to recommend Geocities to Yahoo! Group owners and moderators, who
cannot make graphics viewable to visitors unless they link to it, and to
Yahoo! Club founders who require document and photo storage space. These
were both Yahoo! created problems and it seemed logical that the same
servers that hosted our clubs and groups might carry the solution to those
problems to speed the data transfer. That was before you imposed this
unrealistic traffic limitation, which we seem to violate monthly by doing
the very thing you want us to do, increase traffic to Yahoo!.
We have no intention of paying for data transfer, but we also will never again
recommend Geocities. It is not merely that we cannot participate in
data exchange programs any longer because you refuse to
allow the link. It's not merely that we have to put up with pop-up
advertising that takes up a third of our page or causes our page to fail to
load when your java fails, but we have to pay extra for the privilege of
bringing more potential customers to view your ads? Someone got this
backward. You should be paying us every time someone views our pages not
charging us. |
This communication, of course, bounced because they're really not interested in answering our concerns in this matter. Indeed, they appear only interested in charging us a user fee to pay for their uninterrupted advertising space. For $8.95 USD, you get 10 gig data transfer and an additional 5 meg of space; for $11.95 USD, you get 20 gig transfer plus an additional 50 meg of space, and for an undisclosed additional $$ fee once you have opted into one of these programs, you get unlimited data transfer. That might make sense for a commercial entity using Geocities, but not for a personal one or one for your Boy Scout Troop, Third Grade Class, or Women's group.
We reiterate...We Protest!
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