| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: YHOO NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component |
| Industry | Internet, Computer software |
| Founded | Santa Clara, California, U.S. (March 1, 1995) |
| Founder(s) | Jerry Yang, David Filo |
| Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California, U.S. |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Roy Bostock (Chairman) Scott Thompson (CEO) |
| Products | See list of Yahoo! products. |
| Revenue | US$ 6.324 billion (2010)[1] |
| Operating income | US$ 1.070 billion (2010)[1] |
| Net income | US$ 1.232 billion (2010)[1] |
| Total assets | US$ 14.928 billion (2010)[1] |
| Total equity | US$ 12.596 billion (2010)[1] |
| Employees | 13,600 (2010)[1] |
| Subsidiaries | List of subsidiaries of Yahoo! |
| Website | Yahoo.com |
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services. It is one of the largest websites in the United States.[2]
Yahoo! inclusive was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairman of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.[3] On September 6, 2011, Bartz was removed from her position at Yahoo! by chairman Roy Bostock and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.[4][5]
According to news sources roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month.[6][7] Yahoo! itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages".[8]
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web".[9] David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".[10][11] The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[12] The word is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."[13] The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo! database was arranged in directory layers. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom," and "officious", rather than being related in any way to the meaning of the word, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo! database while surfing from work.[14] However, Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Filo's college girlfriend often referred to Filo as a "yahoo." This meaning derives from the name of a race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a web portal. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it settled at a post-bubble low of $4.05 on 26 September 2001.
In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search results. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail service to compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD $44.6 billion. Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo! had a stock market capitalization of USD $22.24 billion.[15] Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009.[16] In September 2011 she was removed from her position at Yahoo! by the company's chairman Roy Bostock (via phone call), and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.
Yahoo! operates the web portal which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gives users access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.
Working with comScore, The New York Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about webusers than its competitors from its websites and advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.[17]
As of May 22, 2008, an article in Computer World states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse, which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion events a day. Yahoo claimed it is expected to grow in multiples of 10 petabytes by 2009 and that this database is the largest in the world.[18] In contrast the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) database of all US taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.[18]
As of December 18, 2008, Yahoo! retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, In response to European Regulators, Yahoo scrambles the last eight digits of a users IP address after three months, rendering them partially anonymous.[19]
Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.[20]
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo! Buzz, MyBlogLog, Delicious and a handful of other products.[21]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they would no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intended to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Mash experimental system.[22]
Yahoo! partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information onto a single page.
On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, a site tailored for women seeking online information and advice between the ages of 25 and 54.[23]
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.
Yahoo! Mobile offers services for email, instant messaging, and mobile blogging, as well as information services, searches and alerts. Services for the camera phone include entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos.
Yahoo! also introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch, developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The company's officials stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new service presents a list of actual information, which may include news headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings, local weather, and links to other sites. Instead of showing only, for example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, along with user ratings and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.[24]
Yahoo! uses Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.[25]
On October 8, 2010, Yahoo! announced plans to brings video chat to iPhones and Android-based phones via its popular Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.[26]
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia.[27]
Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services on the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.[28]
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, clickthrough rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.[29]
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!,[30] an online advertising management platform.[31] The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.[32]
In September 2011, Yahoo formed an ad selling strategic partnership with 2 of its top competitors, AOL and Microsoft.[33]
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology.[34] Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.[35] On October 8, 2010, The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.[36]
Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
Yahoo! Koprol is an Indonesian social networking site based on location without the use of any GPS devices. Koprol was bought by Yahoo in May 2011 with 75,000 users. Koprol has accrued 1.5 million users as of early July 2011 at one year old.[37]
Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.[38]
Geocities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.[39] Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999, and ten years later, the web host was closed,[40] deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive,[41] "OOcities.com", and other such databases.[42]
Yahoo! Go, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed down on January 12, 2010.[43]
Yahoo! 360° was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009.[44] Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.[45]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with Flickr. Yahoo! Tech was a website that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the website in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section.[46] Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.[47]
Hotjobs was acquired by and merged with Monster.com.
On December 15, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during an employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.[48]
The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, MyM, AlltheWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Under "Merge" was: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, and FireEagle.
11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad.[49] Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.
The blog on del.icio.us released a post by Chris Yeh after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities – including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) – are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press."[50] On April 27, 2011, an announcement said that Delicious has been sold to Avos by Yahoo! [51]
Yahoo! Buzz was closed down on April 21, 2011 with no official announcement by Yahoo![52]
Yahoo! announced it will close down MyBlogLog on May 24, 2011 [53]
About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2009 came from marketing services.[54] The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. With the search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo! aims to increase revenue generated from search.[55]
Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo! include display and contextual advertising.
In 2000, Yahoo! was taken to court in France by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nazi Party.[56] In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine,[57] but Yahoo! discontinued the paid inclusion / search submit program at the end of 2009.[58] Yahoo! has also been criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo! ad network to companies who display them through spyware and adware.[59][60]
Yahoo! as well as other search engines, have cooperated with the Chinese government in censoring search results. In April 2005, dissident Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "providing state secrets to foreign entities"[61] as a result of being identified by IP address by Yahoo![62] The extent of Yahoo's foreknowledge of Shi's fate is disputed by Yahoo! General Counsel and human rights organizations.[63] Human rights groups also accuse Yahoo! of aiding authorities in the arrest of dissident Li Zhi. In September 2003, dissident Wang Xiaoning was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison. Yahoo! helped authorities to identify posts he had made in a Yahoo! group calling for an end to single-party rule.[64] Both Xiaoning's wife and the World Organization for Human Rights[65] sued Yahoo! under human rights laws on behalf of Wang and Shi.[66]
As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005.[67] On May 25, 2006, Yahoo!'s image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on.[68] Yahoo! is a 40% owner of Alibaba Group, which was previously a subject of controversy for allowing the sale of shark-derived products. Nevertheless, the company banned the sale of shark fin products on all its e-commerce platforms in January 1, 2009. On November 30, 2009, Yahoo! was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending a DMCA notice to whistle-blower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures[69] on obtaining private information pertaining to Yahoo!'s subscribers.[70]
After some concerns over censorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests were raised,[71][72] Yahoo! responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.[73]
Adobe and Yahoo appear to have been among the targets of cyber attacks originating in China that prompted Google Inc. to threaten to leave the Asian nation in a surprise announcement on January 12, 2010.[74]
| Year | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | 1,625 | 3,574 | 5,258 | 6,426 | 6,969 | 7,208 | 6,460 | 6,324 |
| EBITDA | 453 | 1,000 | 1,505 | 1,066 | ||||
| Net Results | 238 | 840 | 1,896 | 751 | 660 | 424 | 597 | 1,231 |
| Staff | 5,500 | 7,600 | 9,800 | 11,400 | 13,900 | 13,600 |
As of January, 2010, Yahoo held the world's largest market share in online display advertising. JP Morgan put the company’s US market share for display ads at 17%, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft at 11% and AOL at 7%.[76]
Yahoo! is known across the world with its multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over 20 languages, including English. The official directory for all of the Yahoo! International sites is world.yahoo.com.
Each of the international sites are wholly owned by Yahoo!, with the exception of Yahoo! Japan , in which it holds a 34.75% minority SoftBank holds 35.45%,[77] Yahoo!Xtra in New Zealand which Yahoo!7 have 51% of and 49% belongs to Telecom New Zealand and Yahoo!7 in Australia which is a 50-50 agreement between Yahoo! and the Seven Network. Historically, Yahoo! entered into joint venture agreements with SoftBank for the major European sites (UK, France, Germany) and well as Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo! purchased the minority interests that SoftBank owned in Europe and Korea.
Yahoo! holds a 40% stake in Alibaba, which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo! brand name. Yahoo! in the USA does not have direct control over the operations of Alibaba, which operates as a completely independent company.
In 2008, Darren Petterson, business development director for Yahoo! Europe confirmed that Yahoo! was going to launch a Romanian version of their website by the end of the year,[78][79] however, due to the financial crisis at that time, those plans were frozen.[80] In February 2010, new reports appeared in the Romanian media claiming that the portal will finally launch by June the same year, as some services like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mobile are already translated into Romanian.[81][82] On 8 March 2011 Yahoo! launched its Romania local service.
The first logo was used when the company was founded in 1995. It was red and had three icons on each side.[83]
The logo used on the main page yahoo.com used to be red with a black outline and shadow, but in May 2009, along with a new theme redesign, the logo was changed to purple with no outline or shadow.
Sometimes, the logo is abbreviated with Y!.[84]
Themes and page designs are different on some international Yahoo! home pages, such as Yahoo! Australia,[85] Yahoo! India,[86] etc
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