Yahoo may be selling… Yahoo (nytimes). As a business, what is Yahoo? Mostly selling ads? If so, is it fair to say that the rise of ad blockers (cutting revenue in an obvious way) and Facebook (cutting Yahoo’s revenue by creating an infinite supply of page views for advertisers) have killed Yahoo?
It seems as though there is are a variety of interesting and lucrative things that could be built using Yahoo’s audience as a springboard, but if the only way to get revenue is by selling ads and ad revenue per page view is plummeting, what could Yahoo do?
Facebook? Maybe a little. Ad blockers? Nah. Bad management killed Yahoo, based on my reading of X. Cringely’s occasional coverage of Yahoo. (My URI is a link to his blog.)
Do you not remember the days when Yahoo web page was a massive tree-structure? Yahoo died because it focused too much on categorizing the web vs. providing a simple relevancy ranking results as Google did.
As for Facebook, we should thank smart phone (aka phones with cameras) that made it what it is today. Take away picture posting on Facebook and it will die in a week.
When Google demonstrated that algorithm-driven search gave superior results, Yahoo’s hand-edited search directory days were numbered. Then Yahoo gave up on search entirely and outsourced it to Microsoft. I couldn’t believe the short sightedness of this move. Search is clearly a very profitable business, and they outsourced it. Google must have been very pleased. This happened a *long* time ago under Carol Bartz (Dec 2009).
Several times in the last year or so Yahoo has hijacked my Firefox search options without my ever having gone there. I don’t know how or why, but as far as I am concerned, the first thing I do now is erase it completely.