 | |
Home page
| |
| Type of business | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
Type of site
| Web portal |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: YHOO (1996–2017) |
| Founded | January 1994 |
| Headquarters |
Sunnyvale, California
,
U.S.
|
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | |
| Products | |
| Revenue | $5.17 billion |
| Employees | 8,600 (March 2017) |
| Parent | Independent (1994–2017) Verizon Media (2017–present) |
| Website | yahoo |
| Alexa rank |  9 (Global, March 2019) |
| Advertising | Native |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
Yahoo! is an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.
It provides or provided a Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! was the most widely read news and media website – with over 7 billion views per month – ranking as the sixth-most-visited website globally in 2016.
Once one of the largest internet companies, Yahoo! slowly declined starting in the late 2000s, and in 2017 Verizon Communications acquired most of Yahoo's Internet business for $4.48 billion, excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan, which were transferred to Yahoo's successor company Altaba. Despite its decline from prominence, Yahoo! domain websites are still one of the most popular, ranking 8th in the world according to the Alexa rankings as of January 2019.
History
Founding
Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo
The Yahoo! home page in 1994, when it was a directory
In January 1994, Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web".
The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy,
as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and
David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". The human-edited Yahoo! Directory, provided for users to surf through the Internet, became their first product and the company's original purpose. The "yahoo.com" domain was created on January 18, 1995.
The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database was arranged
in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean
"source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than
being related to the word's normal meaning, described the many office
workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work.
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." This meaning derives from the Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
Expansion
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo went public in April 1996 and its stock price rose by 600 percent within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite, Lycos and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free e-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo! Mail. In 1998, Yahoo! decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 - that of Geocities for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.
Yahoo headquarters in 2001
Yahoo began using Google
for search in 2000. Over the next four years, it developed its own
search technologies, which it began using in 2004 partly using
technology from its $280 million acquisition of Inktomi in 2002. In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion.
Yahoo formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially
undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its
shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo had a market capitalization of $22.24 billion. Carol Bartz replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009. In September 2011, she was removed from her position at Yahoo by the company's chairman Roy Bostock, and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.
In early 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, rumors began to spread about looming layoffs. Several key executives left, including Chief Product Officer Blake Irving. On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced a cut of 2,000 jobs,
or about 14 percent of its 14,100 workers. The cut was expected to save
around $375 million annually after the layoffs were completed at end of
2012.
In an email sent to employees in April 2012, Thompson reiterated his
view that customers should come first at Yahoo. He also completely
reorganized the company.
On May 13, 2012, Yahoo issued a press release stating that
Thompson was no longer with the company, and would immediately be
replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group. Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million.
On July 15, 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed President and CEO of Yahoo, effective July 17, 2012.
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Yahoo! sign at Times Square
On May 19, 2013 the Yahoo board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging site Tumblr. Tumblr's CEO and founder David Karp
would remain a large shareholder. The announcement reportedly signified
a changing trend in the technology industry, as large corporations like
Yahoo, Facebook, and Google acquired start-up Internet companies that
generated low amounts of revenue as a way in which to connect with
sizeable, fast-growing online communities. The Wall Street Journal stated that the purchase of Tumblr would satisfy Yahoo's need for "a thriving social-networking and communications hub." On May 20, the company announced the acquisition of Tumblr officially and the transaction completed in one month. The company also announced plans to open a San Francisco office in July 2013.
On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquired Rockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products were terminated.
Data collated by comScore during July 2013 revealed that more
people in the U.S. visited Yahoo websites during the month than Google;
the occasion was the first time that Yahoo outperformed Google since
2011. The data did not count mobile usage, nor Tumblr.
On December 12, 2014, Yahoo! completed the acquisition of video advertising provider BrightRoll for $583 million.
On November 21, 2014, it was announced that Yahoo had acquired Cooliris.
Decline, security breaches, Verizon purchase
By the fourth quarter of 2013, the company's share price had more
than doubled since Marissa Mayer took over as president in July 2012;
however, the share price peaked at about $35 in November 2013.
It did go up to $36.04 in the mid-afternoon of December 2, 2015,
perhaps on news that the board of directors was meeting to decide on the
future of Mayer, whether to sell the struggling Internet business, and whether to continue with the spinoff of its stake in China's Alibaba e-commerce site.
Not all had gone well during Mayer's tenure, including the $1.1 billion
acquisition of Tumblr that had yet to prove beneficial and the forays
into original video content that led to a $42 million write-down. Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, told The Washington Post that sometimes, "the single best thing you can do ... is sell the company." The closing price of Yahoo! Inc. on December 7, 2015 was $34.68.
The Wall Street Journal's Douglas MacMillan reported on February 2, 2016 that Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer was expected to cut 15% of its workforce.
On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced that it had agreed to purchase Yahoo's core Internet business for $4.83 billion. Following the conclusion of the purchase, these assets merged with AOL to form a new entity known as Oath Inc. on June 13, 2017; Yahoo, AOL, and Huffington Post will continue to operate under their own names, under the Oath Inc. umbrella. The deal excludes Yahoo's 15% stake in Alibaba Group and 35.5% stake in Yahoo! Japan; following the completion of the acquisition, these assets will be retained under the name Altaba, with a new executive team.
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts, one of the largest breaches reported to date. The United States have indicted four men, including two employees of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack.
On December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data
breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account
information, including security questions, to at least one billion
accounts. The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to forge HTTP cookies.
In response to these breaches, Bloomberg News reported that Verizon was attempting to re-negotiate the deal to reduce the purchase price by $250 million, causing a 2% increase in Yahoo stock prices.
On February 21, 2017, Verizon agreed to lower its purchase price for
Yahoo! by $350 million, and share liabilities regarding the
investigation into the data breaches.
On June 8, 2017, Yahoo shareholders approved the company's sale of some of its Internet assets to Verizon for $4.48 billion. The deal officially closed on June 13, 2017.
In a press release from October 3, 2017, Oath Inc., a subsidiary of Verizon, stated that all Yahoo user accounts, some 3 billion, were affected by the August 2013 theft.
Altaba, Inc.
On June 16, 2017, parts of the original Yahoo Inc, which were not purchased by Verizon Communications, were renamed Altaba Inc. On the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's website, they listed the new company as a "non-diversified, closed-end management investment company."
The former Yahoo Inc. ticker symbol, YHOO, was retired in favor of AABA. This took place on Monday, June 19, 2017.
Products and services
Yahoo operated a portal that provides the latest news, entertainment,
and sports information. The portal also gave users access to other
Yahoo services like Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Messenger.
Communication
Yahoo provided Internet communication services such as Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. As of May 2007, its e-mail service would offer unlimited storage.
Yahoo provided social networking services and user-generated content, including products such as My Web, Yahoo Personals, Yahoo 360°, Delicious, Flickr, and Yahoo Buzz. Yahoo closed Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, and numerous other products on April 21, 2011.
Yahoo Photos
was closed on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16,
2007, Yahoo announced that it would discontinue Yahoo 360°, including bug repairs; the company explained that in 2008 it would instead establish a "universal profile" similar to the Yahoo Mash experimental system.
Content
Yahoo partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo Games to provide news and related content. Yahoo 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.
Map showing localized versions of Yahoo! web portals, as of 2008
Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo developed partnerships with broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. (via Prodigy, BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications, and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo content and services to subscribers.
Mobile services
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 and ring tones.
Yahoo introduced its Internet search system, called OneSearch,
for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The results include news headlines,
images from Flickr, 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 the movie, along with user ratings and news headlines regarding
the movie. A zip code or city name is required for OneSearch to start
delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories.
As of 2012, Yahoo used Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for OneSearch.
On October 8, 2010, Yahoo announced plans to bring video chat to mobile phones via Yahoo Messenger.
Commerce
Yahoo offers shopping 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. Yahoo Shopping is a price comparison service which uses the Kelkoo price comparison service it acquired in April 2004.
Small business
Yahoo provides business services such as DomainKeys,
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.
Advertising
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.
Following the closure of a "beta" version on April 30, 2010, the Yahoo Publisher Network
was relaunched as an advertising tool that allows online publishers to
monetize their websites through the use of site-relevant advertisements.
Yahoo launched its new Internet advertisement sales system in the fourth quarter of 2006, called Panama.
It allows advertisers to bid for search terms to trigger their ads on
search results pages. The system considers bids, ad quality, clickthrough rates
and other factors in ranking ads. Through Panama, Yahoo aims to provide
more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, and
to increase monetization.
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo announced APT from Yahoo, which was originally called AMP from Yahoo, an online advertising management platform. The platform simplifies advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.
In July 2009, Yahoo agrees to use Microsoft as exclusive
technology provider for its search services, and Microsoft will provide
contextual advertising to Yahoo! on a non-exclusive basis. Yahoo! will
be the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for Yahoo!'s and
Microsoft's premium search advertisers. In September 2011, Yahoo formed an ad selling strategic partnership with 2 of its top competitors, AOL and Microsoft.
But by 2013 this was found to be underperforming in market share and
revenue, as Microsoft simply skimmed off four percent of the search
market from Yahoo, without growing their combined share.
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The 2015 Dublin LGBTQ Pride Festival, sponsored by Yahoo
A Yahoo!-branded PC keyboard
Yahoo Next
Yahoo Next was an incubation ground for future Yahoo technologies currently undergoing testing. It contained forums for Yahoo users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo technologies.
Yahoo BOSS
Yahoo Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo's search technology. Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.
In early 2011, the program switched to a paid model using a
cost-per-query model from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS
queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, depends on whether the query is
of web, image, news or other information. It became defunct in 2016 and has been replaced by Yahoo Partner Ads.
Yahoo Meme
Yahoo Meme was a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
Y!Connect
Y!Connect enables individuals to leave comments in online publication
boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with
individual publications. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.
Yahoo Accessibility
Yahoo has invested resources to increase and improve access to the
Internet for the disabled community through the Yahoo Accessibility Lab.
Yahoo Axis
Yahoo Axis was a desktop web browser extension and mobile browser for
iOS devices created and developed by Yahoo. The extension made its
public debut on May 23, 2012 and retired June 28, 2013.
A copy of the private key used to sign official Yahoo browser
extensions for Google Chrome was accidentally leaked in the first public
release of the Chrome extension.
Yahoo SearchMonkey
Yahoo SearchMonkey (often misspelled Search Monkey) was a Yahoo
service which allowed developers and site owners to use structured data
to make Yahoo Search results more useful and visually appealing, and
drive more relevant traffic to their sites. The service was shut down in
October 2010 along with other Yahoo services as part of the Microsoft
and Yahoo search deal. The name SearchMonkey is an homage to
Greasemonkey. Officially the product name has no space and two capital
letters.
Yahoo SearchMonkey was selected as one of the top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.
Defunct services
Geocities
was a popular web hosting service founded in 1995 and was one of the
first services to offer web pages to the public. At one point it was the
third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web. Yahoo purchased GeoCities in 1999 and ten years later the web host was closed, deleting some seven million web pages. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages were mirrored at the Internet Archive, OOcities.com, and other such databases.
Yahoo Go, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo services, was closed on January 12, 2010.
Yahoo 360° was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo and closed on July 13, 2009. Yahoo Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.
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. Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo for Teachers.
Hotjobs was acquired by and merged with Monster.com.
Yahoo Koprol
was an Indonesian geo-tagging website that allowed users to share
information about locations without the use of a GPS device. Koprol was
acquired by Yahoo
a year following its inception and, in 2011, 1.5 million people were
utilizing the website, with users also based in Singapore, the
Philippines and Vietnam. However, eighty percent of users were
Indonesian. Yahoo officially discontinued Koprol on August 28, 2012, because it did "not meaningfully drive revenue or engagement".
Yahoo Mail Classic was announced as to be shut down in April
2013. Yahoo made a notice that, starting in June 2013, Mail Classic and
other old versions of Yahoo Mail will be shut down. All users of Mail
Classic are expected to switch to the new Yahoo Mail, use IMAP, or
switch to another email service. In addition, April 2013 brought the closure of Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME).
In early July 2013 Yahoo announced the scheduled closure of the task management service Astrid.
Yahoo had acquired the company in May 2013 and was to discontinue the
service on August 5, 2013. The team at Astrid has supplied its customers
with a data export tool and recommended former competitors such as
Wunderlist and Sandglaz.
Twitter slide leak on changes to Yahoo
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.
The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, MyM, AlltheWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Under the "Merge" column were: 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.
Despite Notepad being listed as a feature service instead of sunset or
merge in 2010, Yahoo has since taken steps to de-emphasize Notepad. For
example, in January 2013, Notepad was no longer linked within the new
Yahoo mail service, although it continued to be linked in the older
Classic version. Also, starting in mid- to late January 2013, Notepad
was no longer searchable.
The blog on the del.icio.us website released a post by
Chris Yeh after the slide was leaked in which Yeh stated that "Sunset"
doesn't necessarily mean that Yahoo is closing down the site. Yeh
further explained that other possibilities—including del.icio.us leaving
Yahoo (through sale or spinoff)—were still being considered: "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." On April 27, 2011, Yahoo's sale of del.icio.us to Avos was announced.
Yahoo Buzz was closed down on April 21, 2011 without an official announcement from Yahoo. MyBlogLog was then discontinued by Yahoo on May 24, 2011.
Privacy
Protest against the mass surveillance by the NSA
In September 2013, Yahoo's transparency report said the company
received 29 thousand requests for information about users from
governments in the first six months of 2013. Over 12 thousand of the
requests came from the United States.
In October 2013, The Washington Post
reported that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted
communications between Yahoo's data centers, as part of a program named Muscular.
In late January 2014, Yahoo announced on its company blog that it
had detected a "coordinated effort" to hack into possibly millions of
Yahoo Mail accounts. The company prompted users to reset their
passwords, but did not elaborate on the scope of the possible breach,
citing an ongoing federal investigation.
In August 2015, Researchers at Malwarebytes, notified Yahoo about its users getting hacked because of vulnerabilities in Flash. According to them the vulnerability could allow attackers to install "ransomware" on users' computers and lock their files till the customers pay the criminals.
Storing personal information and tracking usage
Yahoo! Kimo (Taiwan) Open Hack Day event in 2008
Working with comScore, The New York Times
found that Yahoo was able to collect far more data about users than its
competitors from its Web sites 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.
Yahoo retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, in
response to European regulators, Yahoo obfuscates the IP address of
users after three months by deleting its last eight bits.
On March 29, 2012, Yahoo announced that it would introduce a "Do Not Track" feature that summer, allowing users to opt out of Web-visit tracking and customized advertisements. However, on April 30, 2014, Yahoo announced that it would no longer support the "Do Not Track" browser setting.
According to a 2008 article in Computerworld, Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse that it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion daily events. In contrast, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) database of all United States taxpayers is only 150 terabytes.
On September 2016, it was reported that data from at least 500 million Yahoo accounts was stolen in 2014.
In October 2016, Reuters reported that in 2015, Yahoo! created
software to search their customers' e-mail at the request of NSA or FBI.
Criticism
In 2000, Yahoo was taken to court in France by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nazi Party.
In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby
commercial websites were guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine. Yahoo discontinued the program at the end of 2009. Yahoo was criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo ad network to companies who display them through spyware and adware.
Yahoo, as well as other search engines, 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" as a result of being identified by IP address by Yahoo. Human rights organizations and the company's general counsel disputed the extent of Yahoo's foreknowledge of Shi's fate. Human rights groups also accuse Yahoo of aiding authorities in the arrest of dissidents Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun.
In April 2017, Yahoo was sued for failing to uphold settlement
agreements in this case. Yahoo pledged to give support to the families
of those arrested and create a relief fund for those persecuted for
expressing their views online with Yahoo Human Rights Trust. Of the
$17.3 million allotted to this fund, $13 million had been used for a
townhouse in Washington, DC and other purchases.
In September 2003, dissident Wang Xiaoning
was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and was
sentenced to ten years in prison. Yahoo Hong Kong connected Wang's
group to a specific Yahoo e-mail address. Both Xiaoning's wife and the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo under human rights laws on behalf of Wang and Shi.
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. On May 25, 2006, Yahoo's image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was active. In August 2015, Yahoo purchased a 40% (23% in September 2013) owner of Alibaba Group, which was a subject of controversy for allowing the sale of shark-derived products. The company banned the sale of shark fin products on all its e-commerce platforms effective 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 on obtaining private information
pertaining to Yahoo's subscribers.
After some concerns over censorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.
Yahoo is listed in the Paradise Papers, a set of confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investment that were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Allegations of sexism against men
Scott Ard, a prominent editorial director, fired from Yahoo in 2015
has filed a lawsuit accusing Mayer of leading a sexist campaign to purge
male employees. Ard, a male employee, stated "Mayer encouraged and
fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to
accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the
detriment of Yahoo's male employees". In the suit Ard claimed prior to
his firing, he had received "fully satisfactory" performance reviews
since starting at the company in 2011 as head of editorial programming
for Yahoo's home page, however, he was relieved of his role that was
given to a woman who had been recently hired by Megan Lieberman, the
editor-in-chief of Yahoo News.
The lawsuit states:
"Liberman stated that she was terminating (Ard) because she had not
received a requested breakdown of (his) duties. (Ard) had already
provided that very information as requested, however, and reminded
Liberman that he had done so. Liberman's excuse for terminating (Ard)
was a pretext."
A second sexual discrimination lawsuit was filed separately by
Gregory Anderson, who was fired in 2014, alleging the company's
performance management system was arbitrary and unfair, making it the
second sexism lawsuit Yahoo and Mayer has faced in 2016.
Management
Chief Executive Officers
- Marissa Mayer (2012–2017)
- Ross Levinsohn Interim (2012)
- Scott Thompson (2012)
- Tim Morse Interim (2011–2012)
- Carol Bartz (2009–2011)
- Jerry Yang (2007–2009)
- Terry Semel (2001–2007)
- Timothy Koogle (1995–2001)
Former chief operating officer Henrique de Castro departed from the
company in January 2014 after Mayer, who initially hired him after her
appointment as CEO, dismissed him. De Castro, who previously worked for
Google and McKinsey & Company, was employed to revive Yahoo's advertising business.
Yahoo International
Yahoo's Bangalore office
Yahoo offers a multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over
20 languages. The official directory for all of the Yahoo International
sites is world.yahoo.com. The company's international sites are wholly owned by Yahoo, with the exception of its Japan and China sites.
Yahoo holds a 34.75% minority stake in Yahoo! Japan, while SoftBank holds 35.45%, 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 and Germany) and well as South
Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo purchased the minority
interests that SoftBank owned in Europe and Korea.
Yahoo used to hold a 40% stake and 35% voting power in Alibaba, which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo brand name, Yahoo! China.
Yahoo in the USA does not have direct control over Alibaba, which
operates as a completely independent company. On September 18, 2012,
following years of negotiations, Yahoo agreed to sell a 20% stake back
to Alibaba for $7.6 billion.
On March 8, 2011 Yahoo launched its Romania local service after years of delay due to the financial crisis.
Yahoo officially entered the MENA region when it acquired Maktoob, a pan-regional, Arabic-language hosting and social services online portal, on August 25, 2009. Since the service is pan-regional, Yahoo officially became Yahoo Maktoob in the region.
On December 31, 2012, Yahoo! Korea
shut down all its services and left the country, with its previous
domain saying in Korean, "Starting from December 31, 2012, Yahoo! Korea
has ended. You can go to the original Yahoo! for more Yahoo's
information." Sooner did that message also disappear, leaving with just
an abandoned, empty search bar powered by Bing.
On September 2, 2013, Yahoo! China shut down and was redirected to taobao.com, and has been being redirected to Yahoo Singapore's search page.
Logos and themes
Wordmark used from January 1, 1996 to September 4, 2013 (shown: purple variant used from 2009); red version still used by Yahoo! Japan
Y! moniker (2009–2013)
Yahoo! sign with address at its headquarters
Yahoo got its first logo during its establishment in 1994—it consists
of the "Yahoo" wordmark which is coloured black and are using the Times New Roman font, but it were later changed.
In March 1995, when the company changed its name to Yahoo, it
introduced another logo which is briefly changed to a more elaborate
text that includes an exclamation point at the end, but it were
short-lived for only 5 months.
Later, in August 1995, that same year, Yahoo changed its logo
again and it became an stylized yellow jumping "Y" figurine on a blue
circle while the "Yahoo!" wordmark is written below, but the logo were
also short-lived for 4 months until December 1995.
On January 1, 1996, Yahoo introduced a much tweaking and refining
new logo which was quickly simplified to just the text and the
exclamation mark with a slight shadow behind the text, although it gets
coloured with red and are also containing three icons on each side, as
well as it becomes a simple wordmark without graphics, and should
therefore create the familiar logo that has been in existence since.
Eventually, this logo were used on the Yahoo home page, and it formerly
consists of the red color with a black outline and shadow, but in June
2002, it were later becoming slightly changed, with new black shadows on
the text that replaces the older gray color, except that it gets
introduced to Yahoo! Japan within the following year, if it gets still
used of today, with a slight moderation in 2013 (see below). By May
2009, Yahoo overhauled a theme redesign which makes the logo become
recoloured with purple without an outline or shadow, but the purple logo
had first appeared on the headquarters and on Yahoo! Messenger in 1995,
although it did not get into its full effect from November 12, 2009,
when the site received a revamp, that will entirely remove the old red
color from 1996, so the change would apply to several international
Yahoo home pages, but in some countries, most notably Yahoo!7 (of Australia), the logo is still using the red logo until 2014,
and at the same time, the purple logo comes up with a new slogan "It's
Y!ou" which is used at the time, and on occasion, it would at the same
time be abbreviated as "Y!"
On August 7, 2013, at around midnight EDT, Yahoo announced that
the final version of the new logo would be revealed on September 5, 2013
at 4:00 a.m. UTC. In the period leading up to the unveiling of the new
logo, the "30 Days of Change" campaign was introduced, whereby a
variation of the logo was published every day for the 30 days following
the announcement.
The new logo was eventually launched with an accompanying video that
showed its digital construction, and Mayer published a personalized
description of the design process on her Tumblr page. Mayer explains:
So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team ... We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail. We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo - whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.
On September 19, 2013, Yahoo launched a new version of the "My Yahoo"
personalized homepage. The redesign allows users to tailor a homepage
with widgets that access features such as email accounts, calendars,
Flickr and other Yahoo content, and Internet content. Users can also
select "theme packs" that represent artists such as Polly Apfelbaum and
Alec Monopoly, and bands such as Empire of the Sun.
Mayer then explained at a conference in late September 2013 that the
logo change was the result of feedback from both external parties and
employees.
Yahoo's fourth and previous logo used from January 1996 to September 2013
Yahoo's fifth and current logo since September 2013
