Downfall of Yahoo: The story behind

Yahoo!

In early age of internet usage yahoo was the prime platform for search and email. But over time yahoo slowly lost its popularity and finally on July 22^nd 2016 the mammoth business #yahoo was taken over by #Verizon for $4.83 billion.

But the point is where they go wrong. 

 Yahoo statistics: Financial drop:

The brand started the journey in 1994. And its manage to accumulate 200 million unique visitors per month and it became the second most popular multi – web platform. Headquarter situated Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo has offices in 25 countries with more than 12000 full time employee. 

26.07.2016 Facts

The company’s operating expenses of all its facilities and services totaled 4.4 billion U.S. dollars in the 2014 fiscal year. Also in 2014, Yahoo!'s net income reached 7.5 billion U.S. dollars, having sky-rocketed from previous year’s value of 1.3 billion, while its revenue was a reported 4.6 billion U.S. dollars, a decrease in comparison to 2008 numbers, when the company registered an all-time high of 7.2 billion and had just finished the prior year with $1.9 billion in profits on $5.3 billion in revenue.

Yahoo as well as all web-companies faced financial trouble due to Google domination of search engine market. But yahoo considered giving competition. Statistics says only 4% of internet users are using yahoo’s services and 88% uses the Google. As result revenue soared from $717 million in 2001 to nearly $7 billion by 2007.

Google

Google just grab the eye:

Yahoo made the big mistake to not recognize the trend which easily acquire by google platform. Google just made a boom to its users by expanded beyond search to establish successful smart phone applications. 

Other Social Media Analysis

Opportunity with flicker:  Flicker announced a photo sharing platform before instagram or facebook, then also yahoo missed the opportunity followed by GeoCities, Delicious and, most recently, Tumblr. 

Hand with Facebook:

Mark Zuckerberg turned the offer down, from yahoo in 2006 with an amount of $1 billion.

Rejecting Microsoft:

Yahoo received an offer from Microsoft of $44.6 billion but denied as they found it “too low” for them. But in the following year they signed with “Microsoft Bing” as they gave up the efforts of creating their own search engine. 

Lack of strong leadership:

Every company must have a strong backbone like Apple under Steve Jobs, Microsoft under Satya Nadella, and Google under Eric Schmidt as examples. But yahoo failed to hire such strong chief officer to execute their strategies. CEO Semel one of the drawback, while the co-founder Yang stepped away from the company in 2012.

Lacking of clear business:

One of most prominent weakness is the lacking of clear target. Where google and facebook produce a giant stage for the users yahoo failed to work together its own search engine, and struggled to capitalise on the social potential of Flickr and Tumblr. 

The larger picture behind all this:

Verizon, bought AOL last year, has announced a $4.8bn (£3.7bn) takeover of Yahoo on Monday. They are taking the core business including the web service, mail, home page. Shareholder are leaving to Alibaba and yahoo japan. Yahoo was formed as a company which provide the email service, photo sharing, and news like sports, entertainments, finance and many others. Later surpassed by other search engines and social media channels.  Current chief Ms Mayer tried hard to grow with this business but failed to bring back the spark.