Summary
Yahoo! has been overtaken in communications (Microsoft IM and Hotmail and Skype VoIP), search (Google), community (News Corporation’s MySpace), as an entertainment portal (AOL and YouTube) and slightly less relevant retail (Amazon and eBay).
Analysis
The old ‘darling of the online world’ has had more than its fair share of woes. It has been overtaken in communications (Microsoft IM and Hotmail and Skype VoIP), search (Google), community (News Corporation’s Myspace), as an entertainment portal (AOL and Youtube) and slightly less relevant retail (Amazon and ebay). So where does this leave Yahoo In the maze of today’s great online brands? Desperately in need of a clear positioning to users and a strategy! Indeed, much has been said about Yahoo experimenting with improving search technology by tapping into the collective wisdom and behavior of its users by persuading users, for instance, to add keywords to photographs they post, publish reviews or attach tags to web pages. However, this seems likely to fail against the great investment and efforts of Google and MSN.
Yahoo! may have great assets in its acquisitions of Flickr and Del.icio.us – but it is hard to se how these will step-change Yahoo’s performance. Indeed they may have a great volume of users (eyeballs) but their search yields still lag Google’s by some margin. The debate for Yahoo is how can it hold onto its users and extract more time online (on the Yahoo! portal) from them. The future is not so rosy and they are looking increasingly vulnerable.
