Ask HN: Is Yahoo Relevant?

8 points by ashleyreddy 11 years ago | 14 comments

I just visited the Yahoo site after about 2 years, just to see what they're about. What I found was a bunch of aggregated "popular" news, none of which I would ever read. I tried there search engine and the results were reasonable but not superior to Google. Every one seems to be touting Marissa Mayer as saving Yahoo. What am I not seeing here?

xrange 11 years ago |

I just visited Walmart after about 2 years, just to see what they're all about. What I found was a bunch of cheap stuff, none of which I would ever buy. I tried their fountain drinks and the results were reasonable, but not superior to Target. They also had lots of rack space devoted to tampons and other "feminine hygiene" products, which being a man, I never use. What am I not seeing here?

ashleyreddy 11 years ago | |

Your analogy comparing Walmart to Yahoo is weak: 1. Walmart hasn’t make any acquisitions that are out of line with there fundamental business which they later shut down.

2. People go to Walmart and Target to buy similar things, relevance doesn’t factor into the discussion.

3. I doubt many people here know who the CEO of Walmart is, whereas we are inundated with news about Marissa Mayer in Tech and Non-Tech news.

Pehaps I have to use smaller words xrange.

dennisnedry 11 years ago |

According to QuantCast (https://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com?country=US), Yahoo still has 74 million users monthly. That's a pretty big number and puts them in the top 10 of US Internet Traffic. People still use them for news, search, and other web properties such as Flickr. Rest assured, there is money to be made from this kind of traffic, and Marissa Mayer is "trimming the fat", aka reducing costs, which generates more profits.

ashleyreddy 11 years ago | |

Thanks Dennis. I see that the quantcast graph shows a downward slope and a loss of about 8 million users per month for the last month. Extrapolating based on this trend doesn't look very good. Are they doing anything to fix this? Does anyone on HN use Yahoo regularly?

dennisnedry 11 years ago | | |

They've done a lot, like rolling out new updates to Yahoo Mail (where they can serve ads like Gmail) and other monetization things like offering prints for Flickr. Only time will tell if it will be successful. There are rumors that Safari on iOS will default to Yahoo, and that may help turn the numbers around a bit.

MalcolmDiggs 11 years ago |

Is it relevant to me? No, not really. But then again, neither is Snapchat or Facebook. So, what do I know?

Wall Street seems to think Marissa Mayer's doing something right. (Their stock is up over 300% over the last 3 years). I haven't looked over their recent quarterly reports, maybe those would hold some key info: https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm

calbear81 11 years ago |

I personally don't like what they've been doing to their web portals (massive graphics, tabloid-style coverage, etc.) but that stuff isn't that important in the long run. They've been doing a lot of right things in mobile with a great weather app and news digest app that I use daily and have been reviewed very well by users. If you told me two years ago I would be spending time with Yahoo-powered apps on my phone multiple times I day I would have laughed.

qwerb 11 years ago | |

What do you think are some of the best desktop apps they provide?

rcavezza 11 years ago |

About two years ago, I was working as the part time CTO for a blog where the owners would write stories for Yahoo Sports that were featured on the Yahoo homepage. The stories contained links to related stories on his blog. Those links would routinely drive 250,000 unique pageviews in under two hours.

junopatch 11 years ago |

Yahoo News is very popular here in the Philippines. Most Filipinos use Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Auction and Yahoo Search(powered by Google, not Bing) are very popular websites in Japan. These are just examples of why Yahoo is still relevant.

qwerb 11 years ago |

I think it really depends on how you use it.

I have a Yahoo mail account but I rarely login to it on the website. Instead I use their IMAP server with a desktop app.

saluki 11 years ago |

YaWho?