12 ms·

I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth

I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars. Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.

dgfitz 5y ago
That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS space I think they would do even better.
- exogeny 5y ago
  They did. Yahoo!’s DFS product is a dismal failure.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to use them ...
  - 0xy 5y ago
    Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.
    - menzoic 5y ago
      I thought trending feed was based on metrics
      - csunbird 5y ago
        Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented manually from entering the trending feed as well.
        ecommerceguy 5y ago
        Hence the finger on the scales. It would be naive to think Twitter doesn't have shills that troll here to downvote anti-twitter posts such as the one above. edit: lol case in point. I once tried twitter advertising and it was the worst ad spend ever.
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have evidence of abuse, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you have no specific evidence, then posts like this are not allowed. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
        HappySweeney 5y ago
        "Cocaine" trends every Saturday early morning, leading me to believe nobody has their thumbs on that particular scale.
        5y ago
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition. The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money". Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
    - mssundaram 5y ago
      Certainly not all of them. Edit - do you not consider Warren Buffet a conservative investor?
      - nappy-doo 5y ago
        Or your definition of conservative is different from OP's.
      - ketamine__ 5y ago
        Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs, market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article written by Vitalik Buterin.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
- slg 5y ago
  >Yahoo sports apps I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
  - spullara 5y ago
    I looked this up. The top 2 are DraftKings and FanDuel. They have 90% marketshare. Yahoo is tied for 3rd.
    - StLCylone 5y ago
      Source? Just want to read about it myself.
      - spullara 5y ago
        https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/North-America-Fantasy-Sports-Market-Growth-Trends-COVID-19-Impact-and-Forecasts-Report-2021-2026-Featuring-DraftKings-Fan-Duel-Yahoo-Fantasy-Sports-CBS-Sports-ESPN---ResearchAndMarkets.com https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/Nor...
    - slg 5y ago
      I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
      - spullara 5y ago
        You're thinking share of users I think rather than share of revenue. But happy to be proven wrong with some other numbers.
the_local_host 5y ago
Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance. It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.
- schnevets 5y ago
  I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    Conflict of interest in what sense?
  - kreeben 5y ago
    Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
- amoorthy 5y ago
  Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
  - ConceptJunkie 5y ago
    Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily, and just kills them, even if they are popular.
NationalPark 5y ago
Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so I don't think it's particularly important (to them). Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation? A lot of it is about presentation. Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room. A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products. But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.
basch 5y ago
I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news. Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street. And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes! I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.
- oblio 5y ago
  > I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
  - basch 5y ago
    AIM was killed as well.
- jijji 5y ago
  Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.
berkes 5y ago
That market is quite busy, though. I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
zaidf 5y ago
I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
mmaunder 5y ago
Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their paid products - that could have been an amazing business for that division. But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board. Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.
u678u 5y ago
There that horrible feeling when sometimes you search for a stock on Yahoo finance and it sends you out into the regular Yahoo search. WTF.
nate-t 5y ago
Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  It's intermittently posted around the web from time-to-time. There's an anonymous answer from a Yahoo employee on Quora here from 2015 that says $150M: https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.

dgfitz 5y ago

That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS space I think they would do even better.

exogeny 5y ago
They did. Yahoo!’s DFS product is a dismal failure.

enos_feedler 5y ago

I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.

johannes1234321 5y ago
However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to use them ...
- 0xy 5y ago
  Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.
  - menzoic 5y ago
    I thought trending feed was based on metrics
    - csunbird 5y ago
      Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented manually from entering the trending feed as well.
      - ecommerceguy 5y ago
        Hence the finger on the scales. It would be naive to think Twitter doesn't have shills that troll here to downvote anti-twitter posts such as the one above. edit: lol case in point. I once tried twitter advertising and it was the worst ad spend ever.
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have evidence of abuse, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you have no specific evidence, then posts like this are not allowed. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
      - HappySweeney 5y ago
        "Cocaine" trends every Saturday early morning, leading me to believe nobody has their thumbs on that particular scale.
        5y ago
dcolkitt 5y ago
My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition. The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money". Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
  - mssundaram 5y ago
    Certainly not all of them. Edit - do you not consider Warren Buffet a conservative investor?
    - nappy-doo 5y ago
      Or your definition of conservative is different from OP's.
    - ketamine__ 5y ago
      Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs, market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article written by Vitalik Buterin.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
slg 5y ago
>Yahoo sports apps I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
- spullara 5y ago
  I looked this up. The top 2 are DraftKings and FanDuel. They have 90% marketshare. Yahoo is tied for 3rd.
  - StLCylone 5y ago
    Source? Just want to read about it myself.
    - spullara 5y ago
      https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/North-America-Fantasy-Sports-Market-Growth-Trends-COVID-19-Impact-and-Forecasts-Report-2021-2026-Featuring-DraftKings-Fan-Duel-Yahoo-Fantasy-Sports-CBS-Sports-ESPN---ResearchAndMarkets.com https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/Nor...
  - slg 5y ago
    I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
    - spullara 5y ago
      You're thinking share of users I think rather than share of revenue. But happy to be proven wrong with some other numbers.

the_local_host 5y ago

Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance. It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.

schnevets 5y ago
I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  Conflict of interest in what sense?
- kreeben 5y ago
  Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
amoorthy 5y ago
Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
- ConceptJunkie 5y ago
  Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily, and just kills them, even if they are popular.

NationalPark 5y ago

Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so I don't think it's particularly important (to them). Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?

Someone1234 5y ago
> Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation? A lot of it is about presentation. Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room. A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products. But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.

basch 5y ago

I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news. Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street. And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes! I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.

oblio 5y ago
> I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
- basch 5y ago
  AIM was killed as well.
jijji 5y ago
Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.

berkes 5y ago

That market is quite busy, though. I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.

zaidf 5y ago

I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.

mmaunder 5y ago

Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their paid products - that could have been an amazing business for that division. But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board. Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.

u678u 5y ago

There that horrible feeling when sometimes you search for a stock on Yahoo finance and it sends you out into the regular Yahoo search. WTF.

nate-t 5y ago

Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.

StratusBen 5y ago
It's intermittently posted around the web from time-to-time. There's an anonymous answer from a Yahoo employee on Quora here from 2015 that says $150M: https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.