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Yahoo Bids Adieu to Plus Service

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

March 24, 2006, 1:58 PM

Saying it wanted to focus on businesses "core to its future growth," Yahoo alerted subscribers of its Yahoo Plus service earlier this week that it will be discontinued April 23. The add-on provided extra storage, premium video, commercial free Internet radio, security features, and a broadband portal for a $5.95 USD monthly fee or $47.40 USD yearly. Yahoo claimed that a majority of its users saw such a service was not "essential," likely meaning it failed to generate enough interest among Yahoo users.

The company said it would issue a refund to yearly subscribers, but not to those on a monthly plan. Yahoo stopped billing those customers March 20. All features would revert back to those given to users of the free service. Customers wishing to retain some of the benefits would have to subscribe to them on a per-service basis, the company said.

Add a Comment (10 Comments)

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By Natrunner

posted Mar 28, 2006 - 1:22 AM

Too many free services out their to pay for it. It was bound to fail.

Score: 0

By belledecadix

edited Mar 27, 2006 - 4:41 AM

Useless and payable features, it goes where it has to go!!

Score: 0

By GSMiller

posted Mar 25, 2006 - 6:54 PM

MSN Premium...

Score: 0

By blackwing838

posted Mar 25, 2006 - 6:46 PM

PER SERVICE BASIS.... guess they are keeping things around just have to pay extra for it.

Score: 0

By blackwing838

posted Mar 25, 2006 - 6:46 PM

Guess no one will miss the cd quality commercial free streaming music service... oh well.

Score: 0

By improvelence

posted Mar 24, 2006 - 6:48 PM

I always thought it was stupid.

Score: 0

By supermanforever

posted Mar 24, 2006 - 9:30 PM

How about the POP3 email access???

Score: 0

By spiked

posted Mar 24, 2006 - 11:10 PM

POP3 access is still available as part of "Yahoo Mail Plus" (different than "Yahoo Plus" which is being discontinued) at $19.99 per year.

There are several pieces of freeware such as YPOPs! and MrPostman which can let your POP3 client access your Yahoo Mail. Basically, they act as POP3 proxy servers and "scrape" (parse) Yahoo's HTML pages.