9 ms·

Yahoo Groups is closing down

148 points by apsdsm 6y ago

Animats 6y ago
Yahoo Directory is gone. Yahoo Search is gone. Alibaba got away. Now Yahoo Groups is going. The Yahoo home page looks like a low end news scraper site, like Newsmax. It's now owned by Verizon, which feels they should have some presence in "content". Unclear if Yahoo is profitable; Verizon doesn't break out the numbers of Yahoo vs their other sites. AOL is in a similar position. There are enough legacy customers to justify keeping the power on.
- tzfld 6y ago
  The way they leveled down the whole yahoo ecosystem is amazing. It almost seems they've done this deliberately. I'm now waiting for the mess that will be caused by the shut down of yahoo mail and the inability to access/regain the accounts on different platforms associated to these mail addresses.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  That's what's incredible to me. For me and many others, Yahoo was like a proto-facebook. You could go to Yahoo and spend your whole browsing session there, between checking your email, the news, looking at your friends' Geocities blogs, then playing some Chess over at Yahoo Games. Later on they became one of the bigger names in fantasy football. It's amazing how quickly they lost it all though, and I can't for the life of me understand it. None of what they did was new, they just did it better (or well enough) and had the marketshare to keep people there. What happened? And how do you decide that stripping away products people use is the way forward? What's the point of the Yahoo name, if everything that made it Yahoo is gone?
nardi 6y ago
Just got the email: Dear Yahoo Group Moderators and Members, We launched Yahoo Groups 20 years ago to connect people around their shared interests. We helped our users navigate new towns, keep in touch with college friends, learn new skills, and most importantly, build connections they may have lost or never had in the first place. While we could not have been more proud of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today with heavy hearts to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020. Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. To that end, we must sometimes make difficult decisions regarding products that no longer fit our long-term strategy as we hone our focus on other areas of the business. Beginning December 15, 2020 the Yahoo Groups website will shut down and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. We’ve compiled a comprehensive FAQ here that includes alternative providers and information on how this will impact your group content. Thank you for helping us build one of the earliest digital communities — we’re proud and honored to have forged countless connections over the last 20 years and played a small part in helping build your communities. Sincerely, The Yahoo Groups team
- jjav 6y ago
  > Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Let's not forget yahoo brought this entirely on themselves by breaking standard email handling. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/J-IsfA0Lb-6T_NeMD1ENKZyb9tA/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/J-IsfA0Lb-6T_NeMD... From that day forward all yahoo addresses became second class citizens on every email list and got either banned or had special rewrite rules applied only to them. And every mailing list hosted on yahoo groups had broken email headers. Despite the damage, they inexplicably held onto this change and got slowly filtered out of email relevance. That kickstarted the migration off yahoo email & groups. If they hadn't done this, all the long-lived email lists would've kept happily chugging along. Certainly goes into the Top 10 Dumb Decisions of Internet History.
  - HenryBemis 6y ago
    I believe that Yahoo's data breaches [0] was one of the main reasons that killed them. People were abandoning the ship in the millions after that fiasco. Until then, they had it good. Thet could get all the ad sales they could handle, they were reading the emails of millions (exactly like Google, Microsoft, and other 'free' services do), they kept tabs on everyone. They dropped the ball so hard, it just did not bounce back after that. "Lately", every time I duck (DDG) something and I see it's a yahoo hosted site, I just close it and go to the next. I am in Europe, GDPR is, thankfully, the rule here, and the number of <bad word> trackers, advertisers, and other crap that I have to agree with to read something in the Yahoo universe is "too damn high" (to quote the meme). Goodbye Yahoo, we had a good ride, and then you messed it up, HARD. Yahoo managed to mess up so many things.. (I dislike Yahoo mostly for the Tumblr fiasco). Farewell and adieu fair Spanish ladies.. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches
krisgenre 6y ago
I spent a good amount of my teenage using Yahoo services - Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups, Geocities, Yahoo Mail and of course Yahoo search. It's really sad to see them fade into oblivion. I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Personally, I think this will happen to Google. They seem to have lost their way.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    It will only happen if competitors rise up and take over to be honest. I do believe that's doable for most of their services (they're losing a lot of market share to Office365 for their mail and office offerings), but services like search, advertising and translate, and purchases like youtube and android will take a lot longer. Not sure about Maps, I think that's still going strong even though I don't know about their income model. That one's mainly getting gnawed at due to Apple Maps and probably Microsoft's offering being defaults on a lot of devices. But it'll be slow attrition, it felt a lot quicker for Yahoo once Google caught traction in search.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction. Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example: * Revenue goes down. * Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k compensation, especially when so much of that are RSUs. * A lot of top engineers company-wide leave for greener pastures. Worse decisions get made company-wide. * Google finds it needs more money, and starts milking its customers more effectively. Data privacy goes down. Pricing goes up. Etc. * Customers start to leave for free offerings from vendors with leaner cost structures. ... and so on. I think a little bit of this kicked off when the qualified executives left. Schmidt/Larry/Sergey were quite good. Fundamentally, though, Google seems brittle right now. It has a massive cost structure, which leaves them vulnerable (the problem isn't salaries; it's headcount). It's too big to be nimble. And it's not nearly as competent as it used to be. Or as it's competitors. Amazon and Apple are both more competent and more nimble.
howlgarnish 6y ago
The writing's been on the wall for a while: this was first announced last year, then postponed, and the online UI was already shut down in February 2020. Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is worth less than the ever-present cost/risk of policing random contributions. (Which is also why file attachments were the first to go.) For anybody looking for a replacement, I can recommend groups.io (no affiliation), which also has a pretty smooth migration tool and has a completely adequate free "Basic" tier: https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/
- raphlinus 6y ago
  I can second this recommendation. Our Quaker Meeting was on Yahoo Groups for 12 years, but we also saw the clear signs that it was going to shut down, so migrated to groups.io a few months ago. Generally it's been quite smooth. It took a while for the moderators to figure out the reply policy settings we needed, but now it's pretty nicely tuned. (I was only tangentially involved, I'm on the committee but am responsible for a different part of communications, so in part this was a test of how well it works for users who aren't PhD computer scientists).
  - zabouti 6y ago
    Does your Quaker Meeting pay for groups.io? Their website seems to say that the cheapest plan is $20/month, too much for my group to afford. Thanks.
- pbreit 6y ago
  Who works at Yahoo nowadays? Do they still have offices in Sunnyvale? Everything seems on auto-pilot except for some fantasy sports opinion writers.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.
bionoid 6y ago
There was a lot of issues with the "new" Yahoo Groups web frontend. A feedback system was set up, but virtually all the reports were ignored. They removed it altogether at some point, so you couldn't even see reports or vote counts. It became infuriating to use; at first it was basically useless, the most critical issues were (slowly) fixed. But search and pagination was significantly worse than before, and it truncated all subjects, even if they would fit perfectly fine in view. The post overview literally looked like "Can you ....", "Question about ....", "Processor is ....". Putting on the tinfoil hat, it almost seems like they wanted it to die, leaving this issue unfixed.. The (one) group I followed basically disbanded in the year following the "new" launch. I think it's about a year ago they officially closed it down, activity moved to a Facebook group and a subreddit. It's a pity really, I miss the mailing list architecture.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
> Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period, we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. Out of interest does anyone know what they consider their premium, trustworthy content?
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Yahoo Finance is just about the last top tier Yahoo service standing, and it has plenty of competition.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    It's also partially paid, so at least has a chance of surviving.
- Macha 6y ago
  Non-UGC that is brand safe and advertiser friendly. yahoo news, sports and finance. HuffPost, techcrunch and Engadget. Various other smaller properties they own.
- dwighttk 6y ago
  I haven’t used it in a few years but their fantasy sports was better than espn back then.
qz2 6y ago
Next yahoo mail hopefully. I’ve had to fight delivery problems with that steamer for about 15 years now.
cinquemb 6y ago
How long will yahoo finance stay up?
- pepy 6y ago
  the last Yahoo service I use
  - cinquemb 6y ago
    Yeah, I used to use IEX data, but they went behind a paywall so I went back to using Yahoo.
- vaccinator 6y ago
  Are they the only company to offer free historical stock trading data? Because I havent found any other... look here(0) for a mirror and a script to download an up-to-date dataset. 0. https://www.kaggle.com/jacksoncrow/stock-market-dataset https://www.kaggle.com/jacksoncrow/stock-market-dataset
roydivision 6y ago
Yahoo is now just a brand in search of a purpose.
jwilk 6y ago
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20201014053226/https://uk.help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/SLN35505.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201014053226/https://uk.help.y...
ogou 6y ago
Yahoo and AOL are kept on life support only to give Verizon MAU and DAU metrics. They add to the numbers of “total active users” for the corporation as a whole. Email keeps them around. Interestingly Yahoo had a large engineering army it inherited from the offshoring to India movement of 2000s. Much of that engineering capital was left idle as the services wound down. The amount of redundant Drupal layers built to justify their presence was shocking to hear about. Whole families had moved to Sunnyvale banking on long careers at Yahoo. Many are returning now. I picked all this up anecdotally as a contractor there a few years ago. The Yahoo story will make an interesting book someday.
throwaway4good 6y ago
Weird that they cannot make business out it or sell it off to someone who can. There has to be millions of users. Is the value of it really less than zero?
swiley 6y ago
Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?
- robbyt 6y ago
  Completely guessing... 100% speculation. Yahoo likely owned several hard assets that Verizon wanted. Such as Real estate, patents, ISP bandwidth/peering agreements, IP space.
- mathattack 6y ago
  They bought it dirt cheap, not at Enterprise SaaS multiple. Companies with commodity pipes dream of owning the content running through them but it’s a very different business.
- sarah180 6y ago
  In 2015, the valuation of the company was $4 billion below the valuation of the Alibaba stock it held. A popular interpretation of this is that the main Yahoo! operations were considered to have negative value by investors—though the reality was a bit more complex than that.
- Macha 6y ago
  AOL had gone from on top of the world to collapsing to being financially profitable if not reputationally leading thanks to using the money from their shrinking dialup business to get new businesses in adtech and content. Independent Yahoo on the other hand was unprofitable. So I'm sure the AOL higher ups pitched the same dream for Yahoo to their Verizon bosses. Take another fallen former giant, shed the deadweight, double down on new/profitable markets and also the idea that the overlap of Yahoo + AOL would cost less to run together than independently since with all the duplication there must surely be efficiencies to be made. It's not on the face of it an unreasonable bet to make, especially when investors were looking at AT&T diversifying beyond their ISP business and imploring Verizon do _something_. Also given the older age of Verizon's execs and how that fit with Yahoo's target market, they likely had a higher opinion of the value of the yahoo brand than younger techies. Meanwhile the shareholders of Yahoo were happy. they got their divested Alibaba holdings rather than thinking of them being used it prop up a company that was otherwise on a path to bankruptcy, and Verizon even paid them to take that off them. As it turned out, that bet didn't work, for a variety of reasons so now all the pre merger leadership of AOL and Yahoo are gone and even was likely a factor in Verizon getting a new CEO who didn't play up this project so much and just wants it not to cost so much At the same time you need to draw the distinction between valuable for the business vs valuable for the consumer. Tumblr had a porn culture that kept advertisers away, but changing that also drove the users away, so it didn't bring in much money, and yahoo groups didn't have the algorithmic content to allow discretion to the platform to push commercially viable content and so much of the consumption being via email and out of Yahoo's control likely meant that again it wasn't as valuable to advertisers and so worth less. Disclaimer: I worked there through this, but not on any products mentioned here so my speculation is as much outsider based as yours.
riffic 6y ago
perfectly okay with this.

148 points by apsdsm 6y ago

Yahoo Directory is gone. Yahoo Search is gone. Alibaba got away. Now Yahoo Groups is going. The Yahoo home page looks like a low end news scraper site, like Newsmax. It's now owned by Verizon, which feels they should have some presence in "content". Unclear if Yahoo is profitable; Verizon doesn't break out the numbers of Yahoo vs their other sites. AOL is in a similar position. There are enough legacy customers to justify keeping the power on.

tzfld 6y ago
The way they leveled down the whole yahoo ecosystem is amazing. It almost seems they've done this deliberately. I'm now waiting for the mess that will be caused by the shut down of yahoo mail and the inability to access/regain the accounts on different platforms associated to these mail addresses.
thesuitonym 6y ago
That's what's incredible to me. For me and many others, Yahoo was like a proto-facebook. You could go to Yahoo and spend your whole browsing session there, between checking your email, the news, looking at your friends' Geocities blogs, then playing some Chess over at Yahoo Games. Later on they became one of the bigger names in fantasy football. It's amazing how quickly they lost it all though, and I can't for the life of me understand it. None of what they did was new, they just did it better (or well enough) and had the marketshare to keep people there. What happened? And how do you decide that stripping away products people use is the way forward? What's the point of the Yahoo name, if everything that made it Yahoo is gone?

nardi 6y ago

Just got the email: Dear Yahoo Group Moderators and Members, We launched Yahoo Groups 20 years ago to connect people around their shared interests. We helped our users navigate new towns, keep in touch with college friends, learn new skills, and most importantly, build connections they may have lost or never had in the first place. While we could not have been more proud of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today with heavy hearts to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020. Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. To that end, we must sometimes make difficult decisions regarding products that no longer fit our long-term strategy as we hone our focus on other areas of the business. Beginning December 15, 2020 the Yahoo Groups website will shut down and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. We’ve compiled a comprehensive FAQ here that includes alternative providers and information on how this will impact your group content. Thank you for helping us build one of the earliest digital communities — we’re proud and honored to have forged countless connections over the last 20 years and played a small part in helping build your communities. Sincerely, The Yahoo Groups team

jjav 6y ago
> Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Let's not forget yahoo brought this entirely on themselves by breaking standard email handling. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/J-IsfA0Lb-6T_NeMD1ENKZyb9tA/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/J-IsfA0Lb-6T_NeMD... From that day forward all yahoo addresses became second class citizens on every email list and got either banned or had special rewrite rules applied only to them. And every mailing list hosted on yahoo groups had broken email headers. Despite the damage, they inexplicably held onto this change and got slowly filtered out of email relevance. That kickstarted the migration off yahoo email & groups. If they hadn't done this, all the long-lived email lists would've kept happily chugging along. Certainly goes into the Top 10 Dumb Decisions of Internet History.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  I believe that Yahoo's data breaches [0] was one of the main reasons that killed them. People were abandoning the ship in the millions after that fiasco. Until then, they had it good. Thet could get all the ad sales they could handle, they were reading the emails of millions (exactly like Google, Microsoft, and other 'free' services do), they kept tabs on everyone. They dropped the ball so hard, it just did not bounce back after that. "Lately", every time I duck (DDG) something and I see it's a yahoo hosted site, I just close it and go to the next. I am in Europe, GDPR is, thankfully, the rule here, and the number of <bad word> trackers, advertisers, and other crap that I have to agree with to read something in the Yahoo universe is "too damn high" (to quote the meme). Goodbye Yahoo, we had a good ride, and then you messed it up, HARD. Yahoo managed to mess up so many things.. (I dislike Yahoo mostly for the Tumblr fiasco). Farewell and adieu fair Spanish ladies.. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches

krisgenre 6y ago

I spent a good amount of my teenage using Yahoo services - Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups, Geocities, Yahoo Mail and of course Yahoo search. It's really sad to see them fade into oblivion. I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.

kilroy123 6y ago
Personally, I think this will happen to Google. They seem to have lost their way.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It will only happen if competitors rise up and take over to be honest. I do believe that's doable for most of their services (they're losing a lot of market share to Office365 for their mail and office offerings), but services like search, advertising and translate, and purchases like youtube and android will take a lot longer. Not sure about Maps, I think that's still going strong even though I don't know about their income model. That one's mainly getting gnawed at due to Apple Maps and probably Microsoft's offering being defaults on a lot of devices. But it'll be slow attrition, it felt a lot quicker for Yahoo once Google caught traction in search.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction. Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example: * Revenue goes down. * Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k compensation, especially when so much of that are RSUs. * A lot of top engineers company-wide leave for greener pastures. Worse decisions get made company-wide. * Google finds it needs more money, and starts milking its customers more effectively. Data privacy goes down. Pricing goes up. Etc. * Customers start to leave for free offerings from vendors with leaner cost structures. ... and so on. I think a little bit of this kicked off when the qualified executives left. Schmidt/Larry/Sergey were quite good. Fundamentally, though, Google seems brittle right now. It has a massive cost structure, which leaves them vulnerable (the problem isn't salaries; it's headcount). It's too big to be nimble. And it's not nearly as competent as it used to be. Or as it's competitors. Amazon and Apple are both more competent and more nimble.

howlgarnish 6y ago

The writing's been on the wall for a while: this was first announced last year, then postponed, and the online UI was already shut down in February 2020. Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is worth less than the ever-present cost/risk of policing random contributions. (Which is also why file attachments were the first to go.) For anybody looking for a replacement, I can recommend groups.io (no affiliation), which also has a pretty smooth migration tool and has a completely adequate free "Basic" tier: https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/

raphlinus 6y ago
I can second this recommendation. Our Quaker Meeting was on Yahoo Groups for 12 years, but we also saw the clear signs that it was going to shut down, so migrated to groups.io a few months ago. Generally it's been quite smooth. It took a while for the moderators to figure out the reply policy settings we needed, but now it's pretty nicely tuned. (I was only tangentially involved, I'm on the committee but am responsible for a different part of communications, so in part this was a test of how well it works for users who aren't PhD computer scientists).
- zabouti 6y ago
  Does your Quaker Meeting pay for groups.io? Their website seems to say that the cheapest plan is $20/month, too much for my group to afford. Thanks.
pbreit 6y ago
Who works at Yahoo nowadays? Do they still have offices in Sunnyvale? Everything seems on auto-pilot except for some fantasy sports opinion writers.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.

bionoid 6y ago

There was a lot of issues with the "new" Yahoo Groups web frontend. A feedback system was set up, but virtually all the reports were ignored. They removed it altogether at some point, so you couldn't even see reports or vote counts. It became infuriating to use; at first it was basically useless, the most critical issues were (slowly) fixed. But search and pagination was significantly worse than before, and it truncated all subjects, even if they would fit perfectly fine in view. The post overview literally looked like "Can you ....", "Question about ....", "Processor is ....". Putting on the tinfoil hat, it almost seems like they wanted it to die, leaving this issue unfixed.. The (one) group I followed basically disbanded in the year following the "new" launch. I think it's about a year ago they officially closed it down, activity moved to a Facebook group and a subreddit. It's a pity really, I miss the mailing list architecture.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

> Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period, we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. Out of interest does anyone know what they consider their premium, trustworthy content?

howlgarnish 6y ago
Yahoo Finance is just about the last top tier Yahoo service standing, and it has plenty of competition.
- regularfry 6y ago
  It's also partially paid, so at least has a chance of surviving.
Macha 6y ago
Non-UGC that is brand safe and advertiser friendly. yahoo news, sports and finance. HuffPost, techcrunch and Engadget. Various other smaller properties they own.
dwighttk 6y ago
I haven’t used it in a few years but their fantasy sports was better than espn back then.

qz2 6y ago

Next yahoo mail hopefully. I’ve had to fight delivery problems with that steamer for about 15 years now.

cinquemb 6y ago

How long will yahoo finance stay up?

pepy 6y ago
the last Yahoo service I use
- cinquemb 6y ago
  Yeah, I used to use IEX data, but they went behind a paywall so I went back to using Yahoo.
vaccinator 6y ago
Are they the only company to offer free historical stock trading data? Because I havent found any other... look here(0) for a mirror and a script to download an up-to-date dataset. 0. https://www.kaggle.com/jacksoncrow/stock-market-dataset https://www.kaggle.com/jacksoncrow/stock-market-dataset

roydivision 6y ago

Yahoo is now just a brand in search of a purpose.

jwilk 6y ago

Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20201014053226/https://uk.help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/SLN35505.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201014053226/https://uk.help.y...

ogou 6y ago

Yahoo and AOL are kept on life support only to give Verizon MAU and DAU metrics. They add to the numbers of “total active users” for the corporation as a whole. Email keeps them around. Interestingly Yahoo had a large engineering army it inherited from the offshoring to India movement of 2000s. Much of that engineering capital was left idle as the services wound down. The amount of redundant Drupal layers built to justify their presence was shocking to hear about. Whole families had moved to Sunnyvale banking on long careers at Yahoo. Many are returning now. I picked all this up anecdotally as a contractor there a few years ago. The Yahoo story will make an interesting book someday.

throwaway4good 6y ago

Weird that they cannot make business out it or sell it off to someone who can. There has to be millions of users. Is the value of it really less than zero?

swiley 6y ago

Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?

robbyt 6y ago
Completely guessing... 100% speculation. Yahoo likely owned several hard assets that Verizon wanted. Such as Real estate, patents, ISP bandwidth/peering agreements, IP space.
mathattack 6y ago
They bought it dirt cheap, not at Enterprise SaaS multiple. Companies with commodity pipes dream of owning the content running through them but it’s a very different business.
sarah180 6y ago
In 2015, the valuation of the company was $4 billion below the valuation of the Alibaba stock it held. A popular interpretation of this is that the main Yahoo! operations were considered to have negative value by investors—though the reality was a bit more complex than that.
Macha 6y ago
AOL had gone from on top of the world to collapsing to being financially profitable if not reputationally leading thanks to using the money from their shrinking dialup business to get new businesses in adtech and content. Independent Yahoo on the other hand was unprofitable. So I'm sure the AOL higher ups pitched the same dream for Yahoo to their Verizon bosses. Take another fallen former giant, shed the deadweight, double down on new/profitable markets and also the idea that the overlap of Yahoo + AOL would cost less to run together than independently since with all the duplication there must surely be efficiencies to be made. It's not on the face of it an unreasonable bet to make, especially when investors were looking at AT&T diversifying beyond their ISP business and imploring Verizon do _something_. Also given the older age of Verizon's execs and how that fit with Yahoo's target market, they likely had a higher opinion of the value of the yahoo brand than younger techies. Meanwhile the shareholders of Yahoo were happy. they got their divested Alibaba holdings rather than thinking of them being used it prop up a company that was otherwise on a path to bankruptcy, and Verizon even paid them to take that off them. As it turned out, that bet didn't work, for a variety of reasons so now all the pre merger leadership of AOL and Yahoo are gone and even was likely a factor in Verizon getting a new CEO who didn't play up this project so much and just wants it not to cost so much At the same time you need to draw the distinction between valuable for the business vs valuable for the consumer. Tumblr had a porn culture that kept advertisers away, but changing that also drove the users away, so it didn't bring in much money, and yahoo groups didn't have the algorithmic content to allow discretion to the platform to push commercially viable content and so much of the consumption being via email and out of Yahoo's control likely meant that again it wasn't as valuable to advertisers and so worth less. Disclaimer: I worked there through this, but not on any products mentioned here so my speculation is as much outsider based as yours.

riffic 6y ago

perfectly okay with this.