A few months ago I wrote Why I think future Online Data Storage companies will Pay You to Upload Data, I still stand by my prediction, and in some cases, it's already started to happen as Google announced it will pay residuals to YouTube users.
Yahoo has just announced unlimited Yahoo Mail storage, which I believe is a huge treasure trove of user data, marketable information, and preference information that will help Yahoo market it's ads or ads of others. We all know that about 85% of Google's revenue is from Adwords, one could assume that a healthy chunk of Yahoo revenues is also from contextual marketing.
The contextual data collected from Yahoo Mail is worth billions of dollars of potential Marketing revenue
While the details of Yahoo's mail increase are not clear, such as Allen Stern asking for clarification on what exactly can be stored and Christopher Salazar questions if we users really want our data in the hands of a marketing company.
I still believe that companies that offer Online Data Storage will pay you to use their services in the near future. Online Data Storage is getting cheaper every month, so the determining factor will be how to bundle this service in a way that can help users store their entire life online, and make some residual money from contextual advertising.
I predict that Google Mail will follow suit, then the price war will happen, it won't be about which is cheaper, but which mail client, Gmail or Yahoo Mail will pay users more money.
I'm watching the Online Data Storage market carefully, which is a significant portion of the infrastructure of Social Media, you can see all my posts titled Data Storage. If you haven't read my 40 points on the future of online data storage, now would be a good time.
Disclaimer: I use Yahoo mail, as well as flickr for images, I'm also a Yahoo shareholder, and their also a client of PodTech.
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