Is! Yahoo! dead?! Why! web! biz! will! rename! to! Altaba! – the! truth! Marissa Mayer, the CEO of perennial drain-circler Yahoo!, will step down from its board of directors, along with five other members, after Verizon finishes gobbling up most of the internet portal. And once the acquisition is over, the remaining carcass of Yahoo! will change its name to Altaba Inc. In an SEC filing today, …
Mythbusters showed that you can make a balloon out of lead, so I think it should be possible to do the same with gold.
I hope you Alt-tab guys have also noticed how these companies (quite by chance?) are all crowding to the beginning of the alphabet. Look, for instance at Alphabet. I'm guessing that private (expensive) research has shown that this has benefits. Think we should soon expect to see Aardvark, Aaron and AAA Taxis heading for NasDaq listings.
In upside down world, which begins somewhere around Board level, you actually get more rewards the worse you do your job. Thus, as others have pointed out, Mayer - who has been an epic serial bungler - will be rewarded beyond the dreams of avarice for her culpable stupidity. Nice work if you can get it, eh?
It may not be the best photo site in the world, but it does stuff a lot better than others, so it would be a real shame to see it vanish down the plug-hole.
I assume the new owners can carry on using it for data mining and ad-thrusting - but will they be prepared to provide 1TB free per user??
"My advice: save your collection now, because it will probably disappear with barely a warning."
Applies to pretty well anything cloud-based. Even if it doesn't disappear entirely it might suddenly be truncated because you're using it too much.
It's not rocket science.
Google today makes 90% of its profit from advertising. That's so much it can even afford experimental loss making toy projects, recently spun off as Alphabet, without breaking sweat. Why was, and is, it the only player in town? Yeah, some other big names like Microsoft and Yahoo (and err... ?) have some token competing ad platform, but that's all. These ad brokers pay website owners to show their ads, the website owners can chop and choose instantly with the click of a mouse, or even run automated software which swaps between them itself for different visitors. Real competition would be healthy and serve the industry better. And still very profitable, even when shared amongst them.
Anyone every tried to create an ad publishing account with Yahoo? In the UK you can't. Full stop. For the last 10 years + you get the message "this service is not available in your region". #facepalm - this isn't even getting the basics right. For years now we've seen the reports of how Yahoo pissed away so many billions doing this, wasted it doing that, when all the while Google sits there owning the ad market quietly laughing at its antics. Their ad serving platform is only software. Microsoft too - what happened to "follow the money"? Was there something sinister going on in the early days stopping anyone but Google growing in this space? Today it must be impossible for anyone, even the top corporates, to get in due to their sheer market dominance, but it seemed the strategy of the others was to just pay lip service to it.
I'm annoyed Yahoo is about to vanish - their throw away email accounts have severed me very well for years.
Because in advertising, there's only room for one at the top. Also-ran quickly get pressured and squeezed out unless they have alternate revenue streams like Microsoft and Bing. Yahoo was probably trying for those alternate streams, but it's already final table and Google already holds 90% of the chips.
Advertising not on Yahoo?
That was it's biggest problem. It was full of banners, pop ups and stupid full page overlaps.
It is one of the worst offenders out there, to the extent, that site is may be one of the reasons many people installed ad blockers.
That was one of the "killing features" (especially in the days of slow connections) Yahoo (and MSN) never understood... they stubbornly believe people must to like all the useless (and mostly crappy) stuff on their home page. Which gives a good insight about the level of their executives...
How to make Yahoo better.
1. Remove the annoying bloody great adverts that make the page grind to a halt.
2. Remove the scam adverts pretending to be news stories, you know the ones that say "See this amazing way to save money" or "10 top destinations in the world" and they are just ad's for PPI or show just more adverts.
3. Get read of the trash news articles and show decent news articles. the whole world doesn't revolve around sleb big bruvver or Kardashians arse.
4 Get you f**king security sorted
5 Intergrate your platforms better.
6. Bring back Geocities for the 21st century. Take on the the other biuld it yourself websites.
7. Make Yahoo messenger less of a piece of bloatware crap...
8. Make your email less painful to use (and sort your bloody spam filters out)
I could go on for a very long time.
and bring back the directory!
There are probably less useful sites left than there were 10 years ago, make it easier for us to find whats left by subject rather than searching for a name that we dont know.
All google searches ever bring up these days are links to forums, amazon, ebay and you tube
But..but..but Haven't comments on previous stories assumed that Verizon was buying the whole shooting match, Alibaba holding included and calculated the value of the rest as $4.8 billion - $Alibaba and come up with a negative figure? Now it transpires that it's that negative valued rest that Verizon are paying positive amounts for (assuming it doesn't all fall through).
If this deal doesn't happen.
There will still be huge fees, but not as huge as if it does happen.
Investment bankers are like scummy marriage brokers. A fee for the search, a fee for a marriage; and who cares if it's a disaster and there's a divorce, closing the deal is the only thing.
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