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As an ex-Yahoo (I quit this week), I can tell you our demographic in two words: flyover country. Here's a demographic study on Google vs. Yahoo from 2 years ag
by seldo 17y ago
As an ex-Yahoo (I quit this week), I can tell you our demographic in two words: flyover country.
Here's a demographic study on Google vs. Yahoo from 2 years ago:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_search_draws_younger_aud.html http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_...
Google's big groups: affluent suburbia, upscale America, rich small towns. In short: you, probably.
Yahoo's big groups: struggling societies, blue-collar backbone, remote America. In short: middle America (and also poorer urban folks).
Within Yahoo, the general consensus is that our biggest market is middle-aged housewives from the midwest. This is a big group, although as the study points out we actually trend younger than Google -- this is because our media properties, likes games, sports, and IM, attract teenagers, a market Google doesn't really serve.
While a certain amount of traffic is driven through partnerships, it's nowhere near big enough to account for Yahoo's enormous volume. Although they're not new or cool, properties like the Yahoo.com frontpage, Yahoo News (bigger than CNN and the NYTimes combined), Sports (bigger than ESPN), Finance (by far the biggest) and Mail (40% of the market) absolutely dominate their respective categories and, despite the general perception of Yahoo as a company in decline, are mostly holding steady or growing slowly in terms of audience.
The selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they believe nobody uses our products.
It simply isn't true. Yahoo isn't growing as fast as Facebook -- hence being overtaken -- but it's still growing and attracting new users every day, both domestically and worldwide. It's just not doing so in a particularly new or exciting way.
- endtime 17y agoIf you don't mind my asking, why did you leave? If it was for career/professional reasons, that is - no desire to pry if it was personal.
- seldo 17y agoOnly too happy to say! :-) I am co-founder of http://awe.sm http://awe.sm, and following some delays with visa paperwork I am finally able to join it full-time. If your business would like better tools and metrics for using social media, please give us a call :-)
- pclark 17y agoslightly off the cuff, but could I have an awe.sm invite? we've been talking about using your service for weeks but can't find anyone with invites :) peter@broadersheet.com good luck w/ startup.
- swombat 17y agoThe URL shortener service looks cool, and just what I've been looking for. You may get a mail from us soon... Would be good to have some idea how the prices scale up past 10k URLs/month before signing up though.
- patio11 17y agoWithin Yahoo, the general consensus is that our biggest market is middle-aged housewives from the midwest Conversely, if you happen to have a stack of emails around for middle-aged housewives in the midwest, you'll quickly be able to verify that they Yahoo to their friends and coworkers in between browsing the Google.
- swombat 17y agoThe selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they believe nobody uses our products. Is that not considered worth fixing by the Yahoo leadership? Having good support from early adopters seems pretty important when you're a tech company...
- elblanco 17y agoYahoo is old enough and big enough now that it's worth it for them to consider becoming a GE or a Walmart. Ubiquitous with everybody but early adopters. And I know that plenty of very good engineers work at GE (and Walmart corporate for that matter, their transaction volume and business intelligence systems are insane).
- joshu 17y agoUnfortunately, the notion that Yahoo management could decide to do something and then do it makes me laugh and laugh.
- anamax 17y ago> Having good support from early adopters seems pretty important when you're a tech company... It depends. Many of the things adopted by "early adopters" never catch on. And, fast followers often win, so if the tech crowd isn't your dominant market, their early adopters may not matter.
- wyclif 17y agoNot just flyover country USA, as you pointed out-- "struggling societies." I would have said "developing countries." That's a much bigger market for Yahoo! I'm thinking of countries like the Philippines, where YIM and Yahoo! mail are still very popular. And don't forget, the RP sends more text messages than any other country.
- seldo 17y agoFor the record, the study was domestic, and "struggling societies" has a specific demographic connotation: http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic_group_j.html http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic_group_j.html The rest of the groups listed in the diagram are also listed: http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic.html http://www.appliedgeographic.com/mosaic.html And as a postscript, describing "developing countries" as "struggling societies" is a little insulting :-)
- xiaoma 17y agoIt's not just developing countries. Yahoo! absolutely dominates in both Taiwan and Japan, where Google is a distant straggler.