Once upon a time, Yahoo was actually cool. Having a @yahoo.com email address was synonymous with defiantly and arrogantly saying: I’m trendy, tech savvy and cutting edge. Tell me what YOU know about the Internet.
But today Yahoo email addresses have been reduced to a cop-out for when Shirley’s Swirley Cones asks for your email address and you don’t want to give out your real account. Yahoo receives all the emails you’d rather never see, aside from when you log in twice a year to delete the 36,000 accumulated messages. The news on Yahoo always seems late, redundant or irrelevant. And the overall feel of the website is one of dust and mothballs. Despite having 700 million unique visitors a month, Yahoo still manages to mimic a destitute Internet wasteland of gimmicky ads and splashy pages.
In short, Yahoo has suffered a tough year and a disgraceful tumble from the Internet and Search Engine graces.
Downward Spiral
Yahoo knew they were tanking, and did what they could to stop it. They knew their market presence was tumbling to the depths of the search engine caverns and they did make efforts to save their sinking ship.
With Google owning up to about 60% of the search engine market and Bing owning 20%, Yahoo is left near the bottom with an underwhelming 13%. With these dire numbers, Yahoo hired Carol Bartz to work her charm and change the course of Yahoo’s fate. They would fire her about two years later over the phone with no substantial changes having been made.
Yahoo tried to catch on to the online coupons phenomenon started by Google Offers and Facebook deals, but their attempt fell flat. Yahoo Deals failed to make the resounding impact the site may have been hoping for, and instead succeeded in creating a cluttered coupon website.
Microsoft and Google: Potential Buyers?
After exhausting all avenues of salvation, Yahoo decided it might be best to sell and cut their losses. But is anyone willing to buy this floundering, fallen Internet superpower?
A huge selling point for Yahoo is that despite its financial woes and irrelevance, it still manages to rake in 700 million unique visitors a month, an astonishing number for its market share. Despite this high number, neither Google nor Microsoft have actually placed a bid on the flailing company.
Price could be an issue in the lack of interest. Yahoo’s current market value is $20 billion dollars, and no one seems to be willing to go above that number for an offer.
However, with an astonishing 81.2 million unique visitors just in the month of August, Google and Microsoft realize what a partnership with Yahoo could mean. Yahoo remains one of the biggest news sites, and each company could use Yahoo’s high traffic to promote their own agendas, be it Google+ or strengthening Bing’s reach.
If the price is right, Yahoo just might find a buyer. The site is not altogether useless and could possibly be saved by propping itself up against a larger name. We shouldn’t count out Yahoo just yet, that is, if anyone’s willing to buy and redeem it from the brink of failure.
