Yahoo’s Failure Story – Webtekno

Yahoo, which was once on everyone’s lips, drove himself out of the market with his own hands, without needing anyone. The company, which underestimates the concept of success, has served its biggest business items on a silver platter to its biggest rival, even though it has not yet gone bankrupt.

The biggest in the recent past From the story of failure that started with success When people from the new generation look at this content, which will make them nostalgic for those who know Yahoo closely, they will ask “what is this?” They can look at it. Let’s explain right away.

When we first met the internet, Yahoo meant the internet.

When it comes to the internet, the first thing that comes to mind was Yahoo back then, just as Google is today. Especially in the late 90s, Witnessing both its birth and collapse in the early 2000s The next generation will understand better what we mean. But let’s start with how it is installed first.

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford University. It wasn’t called Yahoo when it was founded; It was “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. When the site reached millions of visitors in the first months of its establishment, they decided to change its name to Yahoo. It’s actually a radical change.

Since another brand was using the Yahoo name, they chose to put an exclamation point at the end.

It was opened to the public 2 years later. The real adventure starts here. GeoCities was the first place to go if you wanted to do something on the internet in the late 90s. You could create your own site from here. Yahoo bought this site. The project, which is very popular, became even more famous with Yahoo.

But yahoo, This is exactly where he planted the seeds of failure, he could not manage the process and the project slowly disappeared.

Let’s come to the year 2000, when every company invested in the internet.

During this period, investments that we could not calculate were floating in the air. At that time, everyone’s interest in the internet increased, and in these periods, Yahoo was number one and at the top. It was trading at $500 a share; but this was the beginning of the collapse.

One of the biggest mistakes Yahoo made was to present itself not as a search engine but as a “search engine”.portal” was his definition. Google developed He wanted to sell the PageRank algorithm to Yahoo, but Yahoo did not accept it. Since he thought of the search engine as a section within the portal, he made an agreement with Google on this issue: he started using Google as his search engine, which was a big shot in the foot.

With this agreement in 2000, everyone started to hear about Google.

First, Google was used via Yahoo, and then searches began to be made only via Google. This is a magnificent success for Google. It was a complete misfortune for Yahoo And after a while he started to continue the journey alone. But it was too late, because Google was growing exponentially.

2001 was a dark year for all websites; The ones that were opened were closed one by one. Yahoo also had its share of this situation and its share values ​​dropped from 500 to 8 dollars.

At that time, a system called GoTo emerged, which was basically based on the logic of Google Ads.

You were adding a search box to your site from here and earning money when ads were clicked. At that time, Google was not yet publishing such ads. This is what we know GoTo changes its name to Overture and purchased Altavista.com, which was also a major search engine at that time, for 140 million dollars. Again, Yahoo did not remain silent against Overture, which was growing by purchasing the group that includes Fast Search and AlltheWeb.com, and bought this company for 1.63 million dollars in 2003.

Again, Yahoo gained momentum by acquiring many companies. He terminated his agreement with Google in 2004.

The acquisition of Flickr and Tumblr, which left their mark on the period, was a huge development.

By 2005, when users gradually joined social media and produced content, Flickr was sort of the Instagram model of those times. Users could upload photos and comment on other people’s photos. He was literally the shining star of his time. Yahoo was quick to seize this opportunity and Bought Flickr for $25 million. Wait, it didn’t end there!

Yahoo failed to operate Flickr, which continued to grow independently until 2011. Another company bought Flickr. Even though things weren’t going great, they still had a strong user base. Microsoft these periods Yahoo with a significant offer ($44.6 million) He wanted to buy it, but as you can guess, Yahoo couldn’t be smart about it either and refused. Like Melek Subaşı “You 3 billion 750 million, you billion, what did you do with this money?” we seem to hear you react.

The era of Google’s first female engineer, Marissa Mayer, has begun.

with a strong past Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo in 2012. This period was relatively better and more active for Yahoo. Because they announced that they purchased Tumblr, the most popular social site of the period. Based on previous experiences, everyone thought that Yahoo would not be able to hold on here either, but Tumblr was not intervened, only support was given to the site in the background.

Although Mayer made many breakthroughs during his time as CEO, he could not save Yahoo on his own. In 2017, Yahoo was unable to continue after various attempts and Verizon acquired it in a $4.8 billion deal.

However, Verizon transferred Yahoo to Apollo Group for approximately $5 billion, almost at a loss. With this sale to Apollo Group, the companies associated with Yahoo Buzzfeed, Huffpost, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch and Engadget Many media organizations such as have been acquired by Apollo Group.

So where did Yahoo go wrong?

Yahoo, as we mentioned at the beginning, in the early years of the Internet Focused heavily on the “portal” approach, which aimed to ensure that all services were accessible from a single point. However, this approach caused it to turn into a large and complex structure. Yahoo has gained an important place by acquiring many successful projects and running successful businesses within its own structure. However, due to the problems brought by this complex structure, it could not realize the necessary transformation in the projects.

Yahoo had its own special dynamics, and the failure to adapt these dynamics to mobile platforms caused a great opportunity to be missed. Additionally, the company ignored the importance of team spirit. This led to management deficiencies as projects were delegated to non-experts.

All purchased projects were actually successful, but management problems Because of this, they could not fully realize their potential. If these projects could be managed independently, we would see a much different picture today.