Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people
techcrunch.comFolks, please keep in mind that everyone doesn’t live in America. Yahoo may seem like old news for many of us Americans, but across the world, for many millions of folks, Yahoo is still a significant and well-known brand/website.
E.g., I’m originally from Haiti. A really huge percentage of Haitians still use Yahoo for their email (specifically via yahoo.fr) and they even get a lot of their global news via Yahoo. I’ve seen the same thing apply in various African countries.
Anecdotally (and being a European) I was mildly surprised that Yahoo still exists.
I've found their financial page to be one of the best free offerings around. Some of the data and its update frequency are additional monthly fees with my brokerage.
Now if only i could convince it to go to https://finance.yahoo.com/ instead of https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/ when in the office it'd be great.
Agreed; Yahoo Finance is the one Yahoo property I've used consistently forever.
Yahoo Finance is the easiest way for individual investors to download historical securities prices for doing their own quantitative analysis.
Yes! Back in the day (around 2012-2015) I did a bunch of regressions in R using YF data to land on my target portfolio value tilt. Certainly not something anyone has to do, but interesting for a finance nerd.
> Yahoo Finance is the one Yahoo property I've used consistently forever.
Same here! I'm using it from the last 16-17 years almost every weekday and sunday nights. Tried Google finance but I could not get hooked to it.
Yeah it's still incredibly good. I like Ycharts too but that's not free.
Oh man. I forgot about Yahoo Finance. We had a class project in Econ in college circa 2005 that involved making market predictions based on Yahoo Finance with a couple points of your grade based on how well you did.
As I recall I did pretty well in the short term.
How do you feel it compares to https://www.google.com/finance/ ?
Google Finance is a much nicer looking product in terms of design, but the data it has is pretty weak.
Yahoo Finance has much more detailed financials for a whole bunch of asset classes. For ETFs it has detailed performance data. For equities, you can get (and download) data on stuff like dividend history, stock splits.
Just see for yourself. Pick a few assets and compare. It's night and day how much more detailed YF data is. The only real thing that GF has going for it is in Google Sheets you can put =GOOGLEFINANCE("symbol") and get the current price of that asset (you can also give it a second argument for other attributes, but the data on offer is pretty limited compared to YF).
I was unaware this existed but when comparing a ticker on both platforms Yahoo offers a lot more information and metrics, it's nice that there's no click bait news articles being shown for every ticker you look up on Google Finance though.
Google finance used to be great and then it went to crap. Yahoo stayed the same. Also let's you export historical prices.
It is unbelievable what they did to it, I can’t fathom a reason.
> It is unbelievable what they did to it, I can’t fathom a reason.
Was it one of those "We NEED to update the UI for $CURRENT_YEAR fashions!," that drops half the features for "simplicity"?
Look at it on way back archive and yes.
Things (generally) sell better when made for a 6th grade level.
Google Finance looks nicer on the surface, but doesn't have nearly as much data. It doesn't have options for example. I feel like Google had a great opportunity with finance and let it wither like so many other things.
No, it did not just wither, it was actively sabotaged for my use cases by removing data I used to use. It happened overnight with a redesign.
I honestly thought they had shut down this. Maybe they just closed the Api?
I remember having a made up portfolio on Google finance where I pretended to invest money in the stock market by pretending to buy a d sell shares and record my performance.
It was terrible I lost a lot of imaginary money. Made me realize I'm not good at picking stocks. Anyway the point is that portfolio no longer exists on Google Finance. I think they rewrote the code behind Google finance at least twice.
yahoo.com is the #9 on most visited site and yahoo japan is #16.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites
Anecdotally, I still use finance.yahoo.com because it's one of the best free sites out there for financial data. I also use fantasy.yahoo.com for some fantasy sports leagues I'm in.
For those unaware, Yahoo Japan is a separate company, with a somewhat parallel history.
It was a joint venture owned 50% by SoftBank. It went public as a separate company, and in 2018 took back all its ownership from the former Yahoo. In 2021, it merged with Line (also owned by SoftBank,) and bought the Japanese Trademark to Yahoo.
Last time I checked, Yahoo was using another search engine to power their results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
So for many years, there hasn’t been any compelling reason for me to use Yahoo for search
I used Yahoo about twice. Then, a couple of months later, I tried this new thing called google and I don't remember visiting Yahoo again. So I'm equally surprised that they still exist after all those years.
Yahoo is also doing very well in Japan
"Yahoo! Japan" is a different company altogether from this Yahoo though. They were founded by the original Yahoo! and SoftBank. After the original Yahoo was mostly acquired by Verizon, the remains of it were spun into a company of its own "Altaba", which was later acquired by SoftBank and then made a part of Z-Holdings a joint venture of SoftBank and the Korean Naver Corporation. And just recently it was announced that the individual companies of Z-Holdings will be merged into one big company. The Japanese internet business is quite the rabbit hole! (Disclaimer, I work for LINE Corp, another subsidiary of Z-Holdings)
Cool you work for LINE. I quite enjoyed going through the wiki for Z Holdings
Yahoo Japan is a separate entity owned by z holdings.
2 of my family members are still using Yahoo. I haven’t heard any issues from them for several years. Compared to Gmail which you can expect a downtime any month from now.
Wasn't Yahoo Japan always the Yahoo branch?
Like incredibly deeply ingrained in online life on the Japanese.
I believe they are still #2 in Japan
Wait what? I thought Yahoo was an American thing. Having lived in Russia, then in Germany I haven't used it once
I heard it's also very popular in Japan.
Yes, but Yahoo Japan is a completely separate entity.
It also sucks too.
I got the style but not the grace
I got the clothes but not the face
I got the bread but not the butter
I got the window but not the shutter
But I'm big in Japan
Fax machines are also still big in Japan.
https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
And your doctor’s office…
And floppies.
Yahoo is also the homepage for millions of seniors who don't know how to change it, so there's that too.
Or who choose not to change it. Not everyone who has different preferences than you is incompetent.
Who said anything about incompetence? Not me, that was you
"who don't know how to change it"
Have you ever watched an elderly person open an internet browser? This isn't rocket science homie
I'm using yahoo webmail for a secondary account. It's pretty mediocre now but good enough for a rarely used address. It used to be quite good though, basic but solid I would say, until they started "improving" the user interface some years ago.
+1 My dad uses yahoomail too. My mom (hardly)uses Gmail. The difference, my dad started using internet when Yahoo was popular and I got my mom an android phone. He loves Yahoo mail and its good enough and there is no reason to switch.
I still find Yahoo finance the best in class since google finance upgraded itself out of usability a while back - admittedly, I haven't tried many alternatives.
MSN Money is a good alternative imo
Would that not make yahoo more valuable from a future growth perspective. The market in the west is pretty maxed out.
Same in the US really. It’s so excruciating to change email addresses for many people, Yahoo email is still rockin’ pretty hard.
It’ll be nice when we have portable e-mail addresses. Having a phone number that moves with me is really convenient.
Is anybody tracking the growth of the staffs of these companies?
When I hear “NetCo lays off 10K” I wonder, does that mean they will have fewer employees than a year ago? Or is this just a blip on an overall trend of hiring?
This graph[0] makes it look like Microsoft, for example, is laying off far fewer people than they recently hired.
I would intuitively expect Yahoo to be the exception, but it would be great to see something like “…representing N% of its yearly hiring average since 2020” in these headlines.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employe...
Yahoo is at 7,000 people prior to these layoffs, working back from the percentage.
In 2019 they had 10,500: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/verizon-media-layoffs-...!
In 2017, when Verizon acquired them, they laid off 2,100 employees. https://www.fastcompany.com/4040668/tim-armstrong-confirms-y...
The CEO at the time indicated this was a 15% cut (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/oath-ceo-tim-armstrong-d...), so working backwards they had 14,000 people in 2017.
So in short Yahoo has shrunk to half over the last decade, despite mergers with AOL and other acquisitions
Yahoo did not have 14k people in 2017 I left yahoo shortly before the merger. The article says it was between yahoo and AOL. There were many layoffs prior to the merger probably only about ~9000 people were around in 2017.
You are correct though, they shrunk to half over the last decade but they had already shrunk by about half in 2017.
The yahoo that exists today is the Yahoo+AOL post-merger entity, so 14,000 is the right number to compare it to. It's not like all those AOL properties were canned - the business unit with the shutdown announced today came from the AOL side of the merger, as did the site linked in this topic for example.
It’s almost as though news stories are calibrated to maximize clicks, rather than to convey information.
I agree, there's a very weird media focus on layoffs right now, without broader context (number of hires, number of companies, number of unemployed, number of people in the workforce etc).
I’m sure it’s an orchestrated campaign to scare people back into the office. whip out of sight out of mind whip don’t be the first to go whip occupy your desk whip don’t be the last one in whip don’t be the first to leave…
This is probably part of the BDSM role-play among certain executives.
This chart from Chartr Daily is the best I've seen that shows firms hired like crazy and the layoffs now aren't even bringing us back to 2018/2019 levels:
I don't know if anyone is tracking it explicitly, but in more nuanced stories, (eg. Ben Thompson's stratechery[0] - paywalled), it does come up.
Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for many companies.
While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt from ben Thompson:
> The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but while that seems to have happened with Amazon — and for arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot up during lockdowns in particular — the reality is that the rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate off of an ever increasing base.
> In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that: these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have over the last ten
[0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
That suggests that companies could have designed layoffs as accelerated attrition. They could make a prediction about who likely would have left on their own. They could make a prediction (or observation) about whom they were managing out. Then the first layoff target is the staff who would likely not be here in two years anyhow. That's a different approach than for example culling people with higher salaries who are not graded as extraordinary contributors. Either way, I think having an identifiable rationale for layoff choices makes a layoff less shitty to go through.
It suggests they could have, if they were competent to do so. But for all their genius at product-market fit, I don’t think any of these companies have conquered the beast of self-serving bureaucracy.
> I think having an identifiable rationale for layoff choices makes a layoff less shitty to go through.
I don’t know. When I went through one the identifiable rationale was “move jobs to a cheaper country with weaker labor laws and more corruption,” and I think “oops sorry random” might have felt better.
> culling people with higher salaries who are not graded as extraordinary contributors.
This seems like a better way to reduce costs though.
If I got laid off “because we thought you’d quit soon anyways” and I hadn’t given notice already then I’d be quite upset.
Depends on if they keep growing or if this was a peak and more layoffs continue to happen over the coming months/years. The current big bump followed by a not-as-big-cut is mostly from overhiring during the pandemic plus the weird economy. I think a big part of it is to push down wages. Collusion without explicit collaboration.
However, it could be an initial reaction (right or wrong) to chatGPT and copilot and such. The start (or continuation) of the automation of knowledge work. Nobody has a crystal ball, so we'll see where it goes!
I'm thinking the coming two+ decades of AI transformation will make the Web/Internet transition look quaint in terms of societal impact. But I'm just a 52 year old geek that has been following technology for 40+ years ;)
So many commenters talk about the fact that they never visit Yahoo.com, without realizing that the link shared by OP is from techcrunch.com, a Yahoo.com property. Yahoo is a lot more than services hosted on yahoo.com
> without realizing that the link shared by OP is from techcrunch.com, a Yahoo.com property
I had no idea lol
Same. That explains a lot about techcrunch.com I guess.
Now that techcrunch has this hot scoop they'll have to hire people back..
whoa
I feel like the original “curated links” model of Yahoo search (which was supplanted by Google twenty years ago) is actually prime for a comeback. Has anyone at Yahoo commented on this?
We already experienced it via Digg then it evolve to what we have right now that is Reddit.
Oh my god, I haven't thought about Digg for years. It's still around, apparently, but it bears no resemblance from what I (hazily) remember.
I can't imagine the horrors of fighting off lawsuits for search manipulation with such business model.
A curated list of links would not be "search manipulation"; it's protected speech in the US
Did Yahoo ever get sued previously for this?
I love the idea and I'm sentimental about when blogs and personal websites for part of circles and chains.
I miss being able to find a high quality page and seeing other high quality pages that the author or authors recommended
It seems that revenue-wise, Yahoo is growing from ~$5bn circa 2016 (Mayer times) to ~$8bn now. That is impressive.
It is also a bit sad to see the Yahoo buildings, which Google bought in 2019, just sitting empty and unutilized.
One of the good reasons for a recession is that it forces the hand of these large tech companies to stop sitting on huge properties. It’s really a shame.
When PE bought Yahoo for $5B I thought it was a great deal for the PE firm [1]. Yahoo is still heavily used, and really just needs competent management. It looks like that's happening, albeit slowly. Not many people may use yahoo search, but all the other properties are used and provide opportunities.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-...
https://www.lycos.com/ is still kicking well.
Lycos is not a relevant site any longer but after clicking through, one of the first things I notice is how they get temperature units wrong in the weather display. They show the weather for my correct location, which like most locations should use Celsius but the site shows Fahrenheit. Bad. Maybe it's tied to the display language? But no, switching to non-English languages keeps the temperature in Fahrenheit as well.
Having this kind of ridiculous thing in 2023 in a website that pretends to adapt to your location is enough for me to write it off as low-quality trash.
I know a guy, CEO of a company we all know, wont take financial advice from a guy with a beard and another who wouldn't take advice from someone without wooden soles on their shoes.
It is interesting what signals we take for credibility, yours being temperature units on a website.
To clarify, it's not the temperature unit per se, that's just the visible (and common) manifestation of the underlying problem - a website that ostensibly supports an international audience, with geo-location and a dozen language options, gets the basics of i18n wrong. Other examples I've seen are automatically switching to the wrong currency or having wrong translations that are obviously automatic.
I have no problem with websites that are clearly aimed at users from a specific country, which is often the US. That's fine. But things like this really erode my trust in a site, in my mind it creates a suspicion - if you explicitly show me you can provide services in my country and then get the basics about my country wrong, how can I trust your service works properly here?
I was once turned down for a position because (I later learned) my last name is also often used as a first name. The quote was "you can't trust someone with two first names".
Those two guys are just spouting boomer nonsense better left in the 50s, whereas this is "you didn't take 30 seconds to test manually, or 3 minutes to write an automated test for this extremely common and predictable thing."
Not exactly comparable.
Reminded me I used to prefer https://www.dogpile.com/. Also still around.
If we’re playing this game, https://www.altavista.com, which seems to be a Yahoo property now.
My fingers still try to type altavista.digital.com
Seems like only yesterday!
Weird, for me altavista.com issues a 307 redirect to https://guce.altavista.com/consent?brandType=nonEu&gcrumb=J4... which fails a DNS lookup
I still remember my school Computing teacher introducing the internet and saying that AltaVista was by far and away the best search engine (around 2000 to 2001-ish)
> which seems to be a Yahoo property now
Yahoo! bought Overture - the then owners of Altavista - 20 years ago.
And Zombo.com is still alive and well. Even managed to transition off flash.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Tried searching for "google" and it returned no results. Fun
just use "gooogle" instead
A subsidiary of Kakao Corporation.
(Last I checked)
It's kind of awesome in a warm and fuzzy way to still see Angelfire and Tripod kicking around.
Even some old Angelfire web sites are still online. Quite impressive IMHO.
Wow. Ask Jeeves is still around too.
Nah, Ask Jeeves became ask.com.
The website you found is a Google Custom Search, and it doesn't even tell us which company is running the website.
Well, that's confusing. The one, that says Ask Jeeves, isn't, and another site, that doesn't say Ask Jeeves, is.
They'll have Chatgpt Jeeves soon, I hope.
Tucows
Don't you mean hover.com?
They also have OpenSRS.com, Enom.com, Ascio.com and EPAG.de !
Whoa, it has Tripod too!
altavista redirects to yahoo
I hope their business will continue. I have been using my daily Yahoo! Mail account since 1997, and unlike my Gmail account which keeps complaining that I have almost used up the 15GB storage limit, my Yahoo! Mail account keeps quiet and works as usual thanks to its 1TB storage limit!
I work on Yahoo Mail for the web and appreciate your comment! Our team is currently hiring for several engineering roles and we’re investing a lot into the product this year.
I have been a Yahoo mail user since 1997. I like it better than gmail. Both the mobile experience and browser experience is better than gmail
Every Yahoo Mail account I've seen needs 60x the storage given the amount of spam you receive vis-a-vis Gmail.
After you reach 15GB will you stop receiving new email or will your old mail just get deleted FIFO?
You will stop receiving email, IIRC.
This is correct, I pay something like $2/mo for I think 100GB of Google storage, and when my card expired I got frantic notifications from Google that I would not be receiving any email until I updated the card information.
What the hell is Yahoo doing with the other 6400 people?
They have a lot of properties. For example, Rivals, that does scouting and ranking of HS athletes has like 300 people in it. And if you’re not an athlete you probably never heard of them. Much less Yahoo Mail and Finance.
There's also an absolutely ridiculous number of companies in this very same startup space, each with a different sports niche but all with a business model that seems just shy of questionable wrt to exploiting peoples' dreams.
HN: How does every company have so many people?
Twitter / Google / Microsoft / Amazon layoffs occur
HN: The feudal lords have decided the serfs are no longer needed. Google shrinking is a travesty and proves they are a dying company! Time for revolution!
You know that (potentially misattributed) Steinbeck quote about how poor Americans view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Well it seems like a large percentage of HN view themselves as temporarily embarrassed FAANG employees. Those are the cool places that people want to work, so people have a more natural empathy for their employees. Few have dreams of working for Yahoo, so their employees don't merit the same empathy and instead we get jokes made at their expense.
I have absolutely no desire to join FAANG, and I am confident that I am not part of some tiny minority here.
Like Steinbeck, I was not speaking literally. Even if you hate those 5 specific companies, they represent a kind of pinnacle for tech workers in the way they pay, value, and empower their employees. Maybe you would never work at any of them today. They have a lot of baggage at this point. However I’m confident that many people here would have loved to work at a company like them at some point in those companies’ histories even if that time was back when they were run out of a garage.
I'm 100% sure that quite a lot of actual FAANG employees are on HN
FAANG is the opposite of cool. The money is good and there is some prestige in getting through the hiring funnel, but ultimately as an individual you will be unimportant to the company and you will never be highly productive due to all the red tape.
I thought we were mostly startup folks, at least as far as engineers go?
I think this was the case then HN was new, these days it's a very general tech crowd (like slashdot was 20 years ago).
That would be an interesting poll. Personally I’ve never worked for a startup. I’m an engineer at a non-tech Fortune 100 company.
So the startups are temporarily embarrassed FAANGs?
I would imagine this place hates on FAANG more than the average place.
“You could run Twitter with 50 engineers” is practically an HN meme at this point. There was lots of discussion claiming that many Googlers sit around and do nothing. I think there are two consistent sides of this particular debates
FAANG is what you make it. If you wanna coast and make 350k for 20 hours of actual work, it's doable. But if you wanna work on some super fancy team, make it to staff eng, make an impact etc... there's a path for that too.
Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG
That doesn't invalidate the point that at some point they thought "man, 6400 employees really enough to run Yahoo, we really need another 1600" so clearly they thought they felt had work for at least 6400 employees. So what was it?
A lot of not invented here (some of which has made it outside like Hadoop, npm being heavily inspired by the yahoo package manager, screwdriver which is a self-hosted travis clone).
Things that were once difficult but are now easy (datacenter management).
Things that are not user facing but which Yahoo is actually doing with much lower headcount than their competitors (ad tech).
Things which don't actually have synergies and have headcounts comparable to independent competitors (e.g. CNET is a 500 person company, Yahoo has a news business, Fanduel is a 2000 person fantasy sports company, Yahoo has one of those too)
Google hasn't been what engineers think Google is since at least 2008. Probably a few years earlier.
My mistake. Please forgive my usage of HN cliche #318. (Though you appear to be in violation of cliche 284)
But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doing nowadays? Yahoo Finance and search can't take that many folks to run. Maybe it's Yahoo Weather?
It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity.
More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah...
Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/
What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?
How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat.
How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.
How about taking the question at face value and attempting to answer it instead of questioning the assumptions behind it?
We really should be questioning how companies are allowed to grow that large before generating a profit.
If your company's revenue expenditure starts growing to around 1% of the GDP of a small city and you're still LOSING money, at what point and how much employee-risk needs to be taken on for you to prove your business model?
Also crazy that any of these employees ever felt secure. headcount in the thousands to tens of thousands and operating in the red? That's chum in the water.
It runs a bunch of brands, including Techcrunch, Engadget, the remains of AOL... It has very little to do with the original Yahoo! (and isn't even the same company) though one of its holdings is the majority of the old Yahoo! properties still running.
Yahoo finance is actually pretty good.
Still employing them? Probably not out of the goodness of their hearts. What do you want them to do differently?
Edit: wasn’t it just yesterday there was a front page HN post about Yahoo getting back into search?
I don't know, up until this year tech's attitude towards headcount seems to suggest that higher numbers make for happier managers. Which means that emotion is driving hiring which does, in fact, make it done out of the kindness of their hearts.
This is an interesting take but maybe the kindness of their pay packets would be closer to the truth.
I'm really curious how this will affect Yahoo. I know it's not used nearly as much these days in America, but in Japan it's still fairly ubiquitous for Yahoo Auctions.
Yahoo Japan is probably the most visited website in Japan. They are known for more than just Auctions.
Yahoo Japan is a separate company from Yahoo. It used to operate with licensing for the "Yahoo" brand, until it bought the brand usage outright from Verison a couple years ago.
Therefore, Yahoo's operation has no effect on Yahoo Japan. It is more affected by its parent company Softbank. When Softbank faced losses from its Vision Fund, they reorganized Yahoo into a subsidiary (in lieu of being a sibling company) and therefore consolidated its profitable accounting as well.
> Yahoo Japan is probably the most visited website in Japan. They are known for more than just Auctions.
I just walked past a Yahoo Japan physical store selling SIM cards and unnecessary plastic objects. Although it looked like no customer has actually wandered in there since the 90s..
Huh, today I learned. That's interesting. Reminds me of how the ownership is for some of the convenience stores are too.
Yahoo Japan is now completely separate from Yahoo US. Yahoo Japan was originally 33% owned by the Sunnyvale Yahoo but when Yahoo US was sold, Softbank/Yahoo Japan bought back its shareholdings from the US Yahoo.
Yahoo Japan was paying fees to Yahoo US for use of the brand name, but they bought the rights outright recently I think.
Yahoo is still in the top 20 most visited sites in the US
I cannot understand how. Do they have some big deals with some vendors to be the default on cheap laptops or something? Otherwise, who is using yahoo search?
Sports, News, and Finance. Those verticals are all MASSIVE. Remember, just because you don't use them, that doesn't mean no one does.
My opinion, news is pretty clickbaity but Sports (particularly the season-long fantasy games) and Finance are both still best-in-class. It's borderline amazing how resilient they've been.
I use yahoo finance regularly, I do not know anything better.
It must be deals to be the default page and Yahoo still seems to be the preferred end point for search redirect malware:
I like yahoo finance. Also when it seems like slack is having whatever issue and won’t load I open up yahoo to see if it’s my internet that’s the problem.
Muscle memory from my childhood days when I’d type in yahoo and edit my avatar lol.
I suspect they are the most popular Fantasy Football platform.
Yahoo focused on building a large collection of different sites. I don't think search for Yahoo was ever very good, but they could accumulate reach by capturing different audiences.
Yahoo includes many AOL properties that still have a following.
My muscle memory from 1995-1997 to test network connectivity is to ping yahoo.com.
During the ‘90s I pinged yahoo servers 24x7 to keep the inactivity timeout from dropping my connection. Then one day the phone rang - and I discovered they had blocked ICMP so my connection dropped.
There were so many telemarketers pounding my phone that anytime I got disconnected the phone would ring within thirty seconds and that would be my cue to go investigate.
I'm sure this is exactly what keeps the site in the top 20
Maybe no one, but I know a ton of people using it for news, sports, finance, …
My primary personal mail account is still a Yahoo Mail account that was spun off from Verizon some years ago. But I haven't used their search in... I'm gonna guess 15 years?
They target specific niches now like finance, sports etc and certain geographical locations.
Yahoo Japan for example is a large part of their traffic.
No, it's not. Yahoo Japan has nothing to do with the Yahoo in this article.
Also discussed earlier today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730297 (17 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728990 (12 comments).
If you had asked me, I would have guessed Yahoo still had at least 30k employees.
Well give them credit for at least not choosing 7%
They'll be fine. Their business model can handle this. It's opportunistic to timing, less downside PR because all IT sector worldwide is shedding, because "reasons" and they can avoid opprobrium by being in the same fleet.
The business and finance class is trying to wrestle back control of the spiraling wages of tech workers that threaten the existing power structure. Will be fascinating to watch this play out over the next 10 years.
Wow 20% - what a coincidence that after careful analysis and deliberation of what the business needs they landed on a nice, round number!
I love Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Autos. I use Yahoo email. I hate Yahoo's news page, which I find too biased politically.
I wish them luck. Or maybe I wish for a division of the pie, so I could more easily get at the pieces that I like. Either way, I hope Yahoo stays around.
Every time I hear anything about Yahoo, I am amazed to relearn that they still even exist.
I m going back to altavista
I can't tell if you're joking -- but I assume you are! :D AltaVista _is_ Yahoo search.
Of course they will, they have to copy what everyone else is doing.
Pretty wild that this happened to Twitter before yahoo.
So cool to hear that Yahoo still exists!
Yahoo! Finance is a pretty good product.
Actual news: Yahoo not dead yet
Am I doing the math right? Yahoo is still employing 2-3x as many people as GitHub? Surely GitHub has more impact.
In our bubble yes, in the real world...not so much.
I often have to remind people here that not everyone in the world is a software developer. Yahoo may have less of its markets but the markets it's in are substantially larger.
I assure you, considerably more people have heard of Yahoo than have heard of GitHub. The software engineering bubble isn't as big as you think.
What kind of impact? Yahoo unfortunately has a lot of impact from their news service. It is crap news IMO but a lot of people are into clickbait.