IMHO, Yahoo Finance is a wildly undervalued asset. It has the deepest and highest quality data integration of any publicly available site. I use it every day.
It has also been largely ignored for better part of a decade. Three areas where Yahoo just fumbled the ball: 1) Portfolio tracking, 2) Message boards and 3) Monetization. None of these have been upgraded in years.
Portfolio tracking is an exercise in good UI & UX. Yahoo could and should have bought any number of good teams over the years that have built portfolio trackers.
Yahoo finance message boards have very low signal to noise ratio. They should have either gone the reddit model of comments or even better, Yahoo should have bought Seeking Alpha a long time ago. Alternatively, when Seeking Alpha began to grow, Yahoo should have built a competitive product. Instead Yahoo let their message boards turn into a low value destination.
Monetization - this is just comically inept. Visitors to finance sites have and care about their money. They also tend to be older. Some of the highest paid ads target these people: Credit cards, mortgages, health, travel, banking, personal loans, autos, etc.
Yahoo finance should have been the center of a massive business unit at Yahoo generating a substantial percentage of their revenue.
I agree. I would think that the problem of yahoo finance is an engineering problem: in fact, Yahoo finance was built on a solid technology that was good 10 years ago, but has basically been kept under maintenance ever since. Several attempts have been made to modernize it and they have almost all failed. In addition to this, yahoo finance has been an interim property within yahoo for many years, the kind of place where middle managers would find shelter before their next career move, hence the lack of risk taking. So far, it remains the best finance website in my opinion, but it's sad when you think about how much better it could be.
The most relevant portion is buried at the very end:
> While some are scared by the numbers, everyone I spoke to plans to make a bid of some sort, largely because even as financially precarious as it has become, Yahoo remains one of the biggest properties on the Web and it is hard to be able to buy that kind scale easily.
> “It’s like a dilapidated house in Silicon Valley — you walk in and are overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done and how bad it has gotten,” said one potential buyer. “But then it’s in a good neighborhood, the market is nuts and there’s not many like it anymore, so you have to hope you can fix it.”
the most likely explanation is that Yahoo is being mismanaged to drive price down.
Based on your second sentence, I don't think you mean the word 'mismanaged' here. That would imply those inside the company are intentionally trying to lower its value.
I think what you mean is, potential buyers are bad-mouthing the company, or deliberately talking down it's value in public to try to get a better deal.
Edit: It occurred to me, this could have been a substitution error of 'mismanaged,' for 'misrepresented.'
Indeed. At troubled companies, executive compensation (via severance package) is often tied to a successful sale of the firm, and this is the case with YHOO:
If getting the deal done is the only objective, exaggerating the direness of the situation might help shareholders get on board for a deal, perhaps out of fear. It also makes a lower price more palatable.
Of course, I have no details of what is actually going on, so what I've written could just be rampant speculation.
are we so politically correct we have to claim its being mismanaged to bring the price down instead of stating that the price is down because of clear mismanagement? Some might say both statements mean the same but they don't.
The real issue is when a star is put in charge who cannot fail yet does and no one is willing to call them out on it till its too late.
>are we so politically correct we have to claim its being mismanaged to bring the price down instead of stating that the price is down because of clear mismanagement?
Yes. This site is one of the worst I encounter when it comes to ensuring the PC path is taken regarding sexism. It's odd that a group of, predominantly, males feels the need to make so much effort to say, "I'm not sexist!" or "You're a sexist!"
Go back and read any of the old threads regarding Mrs. Mayer's hiring. They're a hoot.
I think it was more Ballmer not having a clue about mobile. When I first saw his idiotic response to the initial iPhone I knew he would fail hard in the mobile space. Even today I think his idea of a smart phone is a Windows Mobile 6 device.
>is that Yahoo is being mismanaged to drive price down.
Remember when Mrs. Meyer was named CEO and HN vehemently argued that she was going to turn the place around? And anyone who said otherwise was accused of being sexist?
Here's a doozy from back then:
"every once in a while I wonder whether she's so much smarter than me that I just can't comprehend her strategy."
Now the narrative is that she mismanaged it intentionally? Should she be thrown in jail for ripping off shareholders then, like this place calls for the heads of banking CEOs?
Interesting that it's still considered such a popular brand. Although I know the brand I haven't typed 'yahoo' in the address bar or a search engine for years. I actually think this was the first time I wrote it anywhere for years, except in peoples' email. I don't think anyone I know have either. Never hear any mentioning of it except in tech circles like here. Do people really go there?
Kind of hubristic to extrapolate your own experience to the whole world and kind of provincial to extrapolate just the people in your direct experience to the whole world.
I am having a hard time recognising any kind of strategy on Yahoo's part. Does anybody even know what the core of their business is? Are they a search engine? Are they some kind of media company? An ad agency? What is that they do? Meyer is seemingly done very little in her four years as CEO. She has shifted things around internally, fired a lot of people and acquired some things. But none of this seems to really go anywhere. The Tumblr acquisition was already a complete bust and has resulted mostly in write-offs. No technology company has ever dug itself out from a hole like this - no company except for Apple, that is, and it took Steve Jobs to do it.
I'll never not be able to think of how they spent $30 million on a text summarizing phone app created by a 15-year old. How humiliating that must be for Yahoo engineers, who have put out great technology and frameworks (such as Pure, in the case of the latter) and could've easily developed this in-house...but few people ever think of Yahoo engineers in nearly the same light as Google or Microsoft engineers, and yet Yahoo is spending millions to further the perceived impotency of their engineers.
Though on a nicer note, great to see that that 15-year old, who was already well-off before becoming a Yahoo millionaire, ended up quitting to go to school to study computer science.
I remember reading a theory that this was a way to launder investment recovery to Li Ka-Shing while disguised as an acquisition and PR move involving a 15 year old wonderkid (with well connected parents)
Not just Li Ka-shing, but also other big-name investors like Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher, Brian Chesky, Mark Pincus, Josh Kushner, Joanna Shields, Vivi Nevo, etc.
> how they spent $30 million on a text summarizing phone app created by a 15-year old.
Nick did not write the summarization algorithms, from what I've heard. He had a couple of NLP PhDs write the core algorithms, which he then bundled into an app.
Wikipedia says as much ("a summarization and artificial intelligence technology developed with SRI International"), but only in the lede, not in the Summly section.
Whilst at Yahoo, I was told going to University was a requirement placed on him by Mayer, not sure how true that is. Also that $30 million for the amount of publicity it generated wasn't a bad deal.
"Publicity"? You can get an insane marketing campaign for 30 million, that might actually have a chance in hell of generating revenue. What was the incremental brand awareness generated by lighting that 30 million on fire, and how much of it could have been accomplished with "only" 1M or so?
>"Publicity"? You can get an insane marketing campaign for 30 million, that might actually have a chance in hell of generating revenue.
You can get an insane amount of actual good product work done for 30 million, and even if you reserve say just 1 to 5 million out of the 30 for generating awareness (aka marketing), you actually have a hell of a greater chance of generating revenue and even, gasp, profits (provided your product is not some piece of fluff).
Paul Graham had quite an interesting analysis of what went wrong http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html . I'm not sure that much has changed. Summary:
Yahoo for various reasons pitched themselves as a media company even though "If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates..."
"The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough. "
"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery."
Since then various CEOs have announced various strategies and not that much has worked well. Apart from buying part of Alibaba of course.
The businesses they have their hands in, they do poorly.
Content? Most of the articles are from other sources and give you a snippet of the content with a link to the actual article.
Media? Again, their videos are curated from youtube and other video sites.
Search engine? They have one of the worst in the business. Mozilla uses it
as their default, which is helping, but most times I run a query on Yahoo, I get frustrated so I'll go back to Google anyways.
Email service? Have you used the current version? I still have mine which has become a spam address I use now. The few times a month I go in and clean it out, it's practically unusable. It's clunky, it's terribly slow, and often times just randomly logs me out.
News source? Most of the news is click baity, gossip, or other "viral" news and isn't that deep. If I want real news, I go somewhere else.
I had no idea they have a Developer Network: https://developer.yahoo.com/ How much visibility does it get? Hardly any. I'm not even sure they're really courting developers. Most of their cool products like Yahoo pipes were closed down years ago.
Now throw in Verizon's offer to buy them. Maybe they'll have the balls to put the company out of its misery.
> Email service? Have you used the current version? I still have mine which has become a spam address I use now. The few times a month I go in and clean it out, it's practically unusable. It's clunky, it's terribly slow, and often times just randomly logs me out.
I'm a heavy user of their email service. Have been for years. Even paid for it for a while. It's not as snappy as gmail (which I use for work) but I find it very usable. The mobile app has improved markedly over the last six months.
I agree that their search engine is ... suboptimal. If you are looking for news or a common website ("where's that bank located?") it's fine, but for most of the searches I use for work, Google beats the pants off of them. However, if stackoverflow is in the yahoo results, it's usually the right answer.
Anyway, not an apologist, just a happy user of yahoo mail.
Have you done anything to improve your experience with their email, or are you just using the stock web version? I haven't used the mobile version yet, sensing it wouldn't be much better than the web app.
I might give it another look and try it on mobile though.
Mobile is a different world. Still have ads, but just one at the top. It seems to get features before the web version (specifically when I reply to a message sent to one of my aliases, the mobile version was the first to set the 'from' correctly, but the web version seems to now). The only issue I've had with mobile is that sometimes I need to search for something twice, especially if I have cleared my cache.
The intersection between Yahoo's demographic and users on this site is the empty set.
But they're still #5 globally, and Yahoo Japan is #16 globally, if you look at Alexa. That's a LOT of users, and showing ads to all of those users is easily worth billions of dollars a year.
As someone else who uses Yahoogroups for a few things, I've been wondering how it's holding on (and when I might need to jump ship). It's got a massive userbase, but I'm not sure of active usage, and I also wonder if it would have been canned were it not for things like Freecycle making exclusive use of it. It certainly has an abandonware (more likely understaffedware) feel to it.
I suspect that most people who have been on the Internet for a certain length of time have a Yahoo email address. I personally used to use mine for ecommerce so my main address didn't get polluted by the weekly sales emails. Frankly I don't really bother any longer because Gmail tabs are good enough at filtering out the chaff.
Anecdotally, among people I know (many of whom are not in tech), I see very few personal Yahoo email addresses.
I do still use Yahoogroups for one organization I belong to and that's just because it's what existed at the time and there's been no reason to move off of it. I'm also a Flickr Pro member and would be sad to see Flickr go away--but that's more because it's a good source of Creative Commons photos for presentations etc. than because I really care that much for my own pics; I could move to someone like Smugmug relatively easily.
Does anybody even know what the core of their business is? Are they a search engine? Are they some kind of media company? An ad agency? What is that they do?
I think in an interesting way, this stems from their origins. They started out as a directory for the web. At the time, few, if any, knew what that meant.[0] And so it remains on up to today.
[0]Meaning, sure we could understand HTML and the protocols involved, but what were web pages, what sort of media were they meant to contain? What sort of things could they make possible?
Instead of improving these products, Mayer went on a shopping spree and bought useless things , like Tumblr (I'm sorry but Tumblr is a complete failure under Yahoo), Sumly and basically let them rot, just like the previous products. And she want to stay 3 more years ? without a serious plan ?
Ultimately, MSFT will buy Yahoo, so I'm sure Mayer will get a good bonus, but what a fiasco she was.
> useless things , like Tumblr (I'm sorry but Tumblr is a complete failure under Yahoo)
Buying Tumblr and then causing it to underperform are two separate points. The potential for success (before acquisition) would characterize it a useful thing.
Yahoo has actively devalued Tumblr, like the other web 2.0 acquisitions, seemingly because they are stuck in a previous era.
You think they should compete with gmail? Groups is worthless. Pipes is a cute experiment and will never appeal to the mainstream. Flickr, if only they could target the camera in everyones pocket instead of the prosumer cream. None of these are good bets...
Yahoo Shopping could be considered a success for it's time, should they do that again?
If there is a next purchase, they should take the opportunity to learn from the new success, rather than try to re-apply the ways of old.
I disagree, tumblr as a social site has fluorished under Yahoo. If twitter, facebook, and pinterest have shown anything, you can build the community and pivot into profitability.
If you want to see failures, look at flickr or delicious.
Don't understand why Yahoo is in such free fall. It is easy a top 10 website. Ads on the site probably sell for millions. Their content / engineers/tech can't be that expensive. What are they spending all that cash on.
Problem is they don't just focus on few products/sites, instead they make like random products(eg : livetext) and acquisitions(quite a few which were shutdown later). Focus is the key. Apart from flickr & Tumblr, there is no other product they own is very attractive.
Kind of! As a normal guy, i can only speculate. But, it's pretty obvious that they don't have a strong product line. The products like Tumblr,finance,fantasy sports,Flickr are good, but none of them has a monopoly over certain area. Also, the ad network media.net which is in collaboration with bing is no where a hit. Yahoo hires really good engineers(some friends work there), but i guess the people in the management clearly doesn't have a strategic vision.
I like Tumblr, but Flickr these days is nothing special. It was wonderful and way ahead of all its competitors back in the day, but now the functionality and interface it offers are table stakes. They let it languish for way too long, it should have become what Instagram is.
I for one use Yahoo Finance because it's a nice free choice (not sure if a better alternative exists). Google Finance lags quite a bit (several hours for many mutual funds) and has far fewer plotting features.
I am not going to use mobile voice <anything>. Not unless we have local AI processing natural speech on my own device. No cloud voice fingerprinting for me, ever.
I imagine there must be companies already buying voice prints and cross referencing them with voiced heard in stores to identify/target customers somehow.
What would be considered a come back for them? Is it even possible to define that?
Over the years they've had decent income, they have great traffic numbers, they have all these things that seem to indicate success inside the echo chamber. Now they've got a shit brand, the brand is right there with AOL. They aren't going to have google or facebook numbers though, I don't know that I'd expect any other company to match those though.
It's just a game now, tons of people are envious of their traffic. they've probably got some great properties as well, sports, finance and fantasy sports seem to be universally enjoyed. Someone just wants to steal it for as cheap as possible.
Split the properties off into seperate companies, with their own management with little interference from the parent company.
And remove Marissa Mayer, who has made some absolutely dreadful business decisions and continues to make them. Sorry this is harsh, but she's had many years to prove herself now, and she has shown that she's not the leader that Yahoo needs to restore its past glories.
Unfortunately Yahoo is a shell of its former self, so I can't see how else they can resolve their problems except by giving different business more autonomy and zero interference. It's rather Darwinian, but those who will succeed will survive, and those who were never viable (of which there were many companies who were purchased for Mayer who would have ultimately folded eventually) will wither and die on the vine.
I think they need to let yahoo.com burn and put their money into some new brands instead. Yahoo was never a clearly defined site and any changes they make will alienate whoever it is who actually visits.
They should take their capital and diversify, creating entirely new products and brands, and/or become a VC company. I.e. milk the current company and plan to abandon ship.
"stock-based compensation remains steady. At well over $400 million annually now, that’s double what it was only a few years previously and means CEO Marissa Mayer is loading up valued employees with outsize share grants to get them to stay."
That's the cargo cult she follows from her days at Google: valuable employees like herself get lotza stock, and therefore the company magically prospers.
Isn't that true of basically every modern company? A term like “cargo cult” is way too strident for a practice which is so widespread – we don't even know whether that's a few executives getting a big payout or a bunch of key lower-level employees being convinced not to bail.
Yep. Giving a total dollar value is meaningless because at most places, the top execs get inundated with stock--millions and millions of dollars worth--and the rank and file get nothing or close to nothing. Would love to see the distribution.
Under Marissa, engineers stopped receiving options and instead were being offered $40,000 in "stock replacement" over 4 years - worth about 3% - 5% of what a Google engineer would expect (unless they were hiring somebody away, and then they would match the previous company.)
They keep switching courses, now the new thing is a Siri "competitor" apparently. Except Amazon and Apple aren't even trying to make money on that, they're adjuncts to actual products. There is definitely room to improve on Siri (haven't used Alexa) but it's nonetheless markedly better than when it started. It seems like not only a tough thing to get right, but again, there is the issue of monetizing it. Just seems like a weird thing to go after.
So, they are doing a good job of selling an overvalued asset? Seems like the sales acumen exists somewhere in Yahoo!, just not in anything that is truly going to help the company succeed.
It has also been largely ignored for better part of a decade. Three areas where Yahoo just fumbled the ball: 1) Portfolio tracking, 2) Message boards and 3) Monetization. None of these have been upgraded in years.
Portfolio tracking is an exercise in good UI & UX. Yahoo could and should have bought any number of good teams over the years that have built portfolio trackers.
Yahoo finance message boards have very low signal to noise ratio. They should have either gone the reddit model of comments or even better, Yahoo should have bought Seeking Alpha a long time ago. Alternatively, when Seeking Alpha began to grow, Yahoo should have built a competitive product. Instead Yahoo let their message boards turn into a low value destination.
Monetization - this is just comically inept. Visitors to finance sites have and care about their money. They also tend to be older. Some of the highest paid ads target these people: Credit cards, mortgages, health, travel, banking, personal loans, autos, etc.
Yahoo finance should have been the center of a massive business unit at Yahoo generating a substantial percentage of their revenue.
What went wrong?