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Millions of Yahoo users switch to other emails
雅虎郵箱告別中國 終生郵箱成戲言
Yahoo arrived in China 14 years ago. And one of the first services that it launched here was email. To many, it seemed to be the best choice at that time. In 2005, Yahoo sold its China business, including the mail service, to Alibaba, the country’s biggest e-commerce company.
In retrospect, this could have been the first hint of its fate. In September 2007, Yahoo China changed its email domain name from yahoo.com.cn to yahoo.cn. The company claimed that this would be a life-time mailbox for users. Combining many of Yahoo’s other services like Flickr and music box, the new email service helped the company win quite a lucrative share of the market, but only for a very short period of time.
On April 18th, Yahoo China told its users that it would close down its email services in China in four months. The decision came on the heels of the closure of music search in China last January, and the closing of its free photo service in 2009.
Millions of users will have to make the change, but a specific number is not yet available.
It was once the top email of choice, but now, yahoo.cn’s market share is only 2 percent.
20 year old Zhou Yiqiu has been using her Yahoo account for 5 years.
"I think it’s convenient...”
But the news of the shutdown caught her off guard.
"I was shocked..."
Before the service is completely shut down, users are advised to register with AliCloud run by Alibaba, which became yahoo China’s parent company in 2005. China has some 200 million email users, and nowadays it’s common to have multiple mailbox accounts, as consumers’ demands are changing all the time.
Wan Quan is also one of yahoo China’s users who’ve been slowly driven away by its competitors.
"The closure won't affect me too much and I’ve migrated my account to AliCloud. I chose yahoo China ten years ago because at the time there weren’t many other free and quality options, but now I also use qq because it’s easier to send super size emails."
Now, the top five e-mail services in China are all provided by Chinese companies. Tecent QQ, Sina, and Sohu are some of Yahoo’s most outstanding rivals.
Yahoo’s email service rank has dropped from number four to six from last year. And for foreign email lovers, there’s also some good choice.
It’s indeed troublesome, but the solution is one click away.
