Daily Mail owner considering Yahoo bid | Hacker News Reader

Daily Mail owner considering Yahoo bid

bbc.com

66 pointsterryauerbach86 comments

The Yahoo brand has really positive associations for me, their company ethos always seems to have been about good design, sharing with the developer community, providing really useful services.

The Daily Mail is a horrible company that will stoop to any level to earn a buck [1][2].

It seems like a terrible cultural fit and it would be a sad end to Yahoo.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133950 [2] http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-blog/2013/01/daily-m...

Yahoo was until just recently pursuing a ridiculously blatant tax evasion strategy to sell off their one worthwhile asset (their stake in alibaba). I'd suggest they are exactly as evil as the Daily Mail Group, just they have better PR.

Tax avoidance - they were sticking to the legal stuff.

It was borderline and now banned.

Surely this is just to raise their stock price? This can't be real, can it?

I hope not, because the Daily Mail are fairly disgusting.

Oracle buying Sun all over again?

And Sun buying Cobalt?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

Most of Yahoo! will be haemorrhaging money. If it drags the Daily Mail down with it, not everyone will be upset about that.

See also Rupert Murdoch and Myspace. And possibly also TimeWarner and AOL.

These giant mergers never seem to work, and I can't even begin to imagine how Yahoo's culture would be any kind of fit at all for the DM's.

Daily Mail may have questionable journalism, but when a large public-interest story breaks, it is often the first to have large pictures of the story. As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

They also seem to be the first to cover category-B news, i.e. a light plane crash in some distant country. As long as there are photos, the Daily Mail will have it on their front page today, the Telegraph tomorrow, and the BBC perhaps on the third day.

When a large public-interest story breaks, they're also not above outright lying and making it up.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/dec/09/pcc-...

anything for that money...

They had the wrong Knox court verdict up for 90 seconds before correcting it. Seems more like a cock up than outright lying in that case.

There's no problem with newspapers writing a stock pieces for either eventuality, and yes, sometimes someone will accidentally press the wrong button, and the wrong version might go up for a bit.

But the wrong story they put up wasn't a generic piece. It has specific claims about specific actions, which obviously didn't happen. They made claims about how the defendent acted upon hearing the judgement (Knox "sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears"), it had quotes from Italian prison officers, etc. It was clearly an outright fabrication. They wrote, in detail, about Knox' reaction to the verdict, before the vedict was handed down. And we only know they made it up because they cocked up.

I also like that they allow comments and discussion on controversial stuff like islamic terrorism. If you read the stories on the Guardian or NYT all discussion tends to be banned in those areas in case someone says something politically incorrect. I'm not sure trying to prevent people discussing the issues makes them go away. I think stuff like that has led to it being "the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world." As well as Kardashian stories or course.

My favourite line from the Guardian came when they realised that the vast majority of their left-leaning readers strongly disagreed with them regarding Islamic terrorism and the refugee crisis.

Closed comments on certain articles due to “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.[0]

At least they didn't even pretend that it wasn't because the majority of their readership disagreed with them.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers...

I didn't even know about this. Thank you. Saving it in case some mod removes your comment. It goes to show the insane biases people have. I know Daily Mail is trash. I also know Guardian is as well.

I'm not a mod but I know they don't remove comments like that.

You sure try though.

They need a downvote button or similar. That's a big part of how the Mail deals with it. Even with the Mail most readers aren't that racist so the upvoted comments are not so bad.

The comments serve as some justification for the newspaper's extreme positions.

The paper can claim not to be extreme by pointing to comments that directly call for murder of refugees or genocide of gypsy travellers.

I think even in the Mail that stuff gets modded or heavily downvoted.

I don't think that's true any more; all the news outlets will happily raid social media and wire services for photos and have the pictures within hours. After all, in 24h it'll be old news.

The Daily Mail can do serious journalism when it wants to. But unfortunately that's a small fraction of the paper, and the website is a far worse collection of celebrity fashion marketing clickbait. (Note the combination of "isn't this outfit SHOCKING" stories with a big embedded ad telling you where to buy it).

They also do tremendously bad racist pandering at every opportunity. The only thing to be said for the Mail is that at least it's not the Express.

Yes, so racist they were the only paper to accuse the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence#Sub...

There must be a Godwin's type law for this type of argument?

It's a brilliant example being it's the _only_ example you can find of them being half way decent.

They were not the only one covering the story TBH. What they were was the only newspaper to directly name them post-inquiry.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1997/feb/15/lawrence.ukcrime

This actions honestly fits the Daily Mail's typical populist, outrage-driven, go-with-the-gut-feeling style. The vast majority of the time this does not work out for them. "Even a broken clock is right twice a day" etc.

Really, though, if I were a Yahoo user, I would be more concerned personally about the Daily Mail's Buzzfeedisms: the celebrity clickbait, their recent embrace of "native advertising". This sounds like the perfect sort of things that Yahoo would try to insert into some of their products for extra monetization. And a great way to make the Yahoo user experience even worse than it is already.

This is the newspaper equivalent of "I have black friends".

I have no idea if the Daily Mail regularly publishes racist articles, I never read it, but the fact that they once reported on a race-related story is not really relevant. You wouldn't accept a single headline as evidence that the Daily Mail is racist, right?

> They also seem to be the first to cover category-B news

not for good reason, it has to be something like a crash of somekind (car, plane, boat, people), something that has explosions, or breasts, and always with pictures to cater for their demographic (I'm not even joking)

I am eternally flabbergasted by the fact they still have not taken this down, or corrected it: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296282/I-dos...

That article could have come straight out of an episode of Brass Eye:

> This is the world of ‘i-Dosing’, the new craze sweeping the internet in which teenagers used so-called ‘digital drugs’ to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics.

Sometimes the Daily Mail even credits the online source that they ripped off. Not always, though.

>but when a large public-interest story breaks, it is often the first to have large pictures of the story. As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

They do say that, but they are wrong. A picture can be as manipulative as any cheap slogan.

It also gives a false sense of understanding an issue, without getting into the details of it (to give a crude example:

Picture of poor starving child in country Y.

― oh, how bad are those X people.

(despite the fact that country Y attacked X and impoverished 10 times as many people).

The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences - it just so happens that you probably aren't in that particular group.

If Yahoo are in trouble then they need leadership to find an audience (and adjust their services appropriately). What better way than to rely on the owner of one of the most successful news outlets? Either that, or it slowly disappears.

Are they really that successful? Total Mail Online revenue appears to be under £100m (although growing rapidly):

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/28/daily-mail-webs...

Now look at the figures for any other UK newspaper.

They're the second-biggest newspaper in the UK.

> The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences

The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with virtually anyone in the UK who has any interest in accuracy of reporting. It is a rag which makes money by selling fear and outrage.

Which UK papers, except perhaps The Spectator or Private Eye, do not make their money through fear and outrage on either the left or right?

I'd say the Grauniad (read - Guardian) isn't _as_ bad as the other broadsheets.

Well, they've definitely been starting on the clickbait and outrage baiting in the last few years. They especially like riding the 'internet harassment' bandwagon into the ground.

Better than the Daily Mail? Yes, not much isn't, even in the UK media. But they're still getting worse over time.

All papers will carry stories that have elements of fear and outrage in their mix of course. What makes the Mail special is that it puts fear and outrage at the very core of its proposition. It is what it specialises in. It will jettison any other aspect of a story, including accuracy, to maximise these factors. It is wholly toxic.

Daily Mail has always had a bad reputation, unless you're in the racist warmongering homophobic group, since their inception over a century ago. I'd not limit it to just with the twittering classes though.

They were repeatedly accused of warmongering in the years preceding WW1.

They actively promoted fascism and the blackshirts in the 30s, and promoted Mosley. They changed their stance in 39 only to avoid charges of treason.

Even amidst their renaissance in the 80s they managed to stay controversial in opposing any sporting bans with S Africa and ran opinion pieces promoting apartheid.

It's only 2012 there was some controversy for running a piece promoting "arbeit macht frei" as jobhunting advice. They did describe the phrase as "somewhat tainted"

They have at least been consistent in their reactionary racist bilge.

Say whatever you want, but they still make money and they have a huge readership.

How is this at all relevant? Nobody is accusing it of being unpopular.

>The Daily Mail has a bad reputation with the Twitterring classes, but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audiences - it just so happens that you probably aren't in that particular group.

It also happens to that particular group has base taste, and the Daily Mail caters to their worst gossipy, vacuous, racist, sexist, backwards, etc, nature. It's a manipulative, right wing, yellow paper/site.

We can't bypass ethics, education, etc. because "people have different tastes" -- and yes, the parent comment doesn't say that, but it seems to imply it.

> but like every other UK newspaper they cater for their own audience

And their audience is pretty enormous. Mail Online has well over 250 million unique visitors per month, or half-a-Wikipedia and on-par with the sum of all of Yahoo's properties. It's the most-visited English-language news site in the World.

Their London-orientated Metro Online adds another 40 million per month.

Those stats are incredible. I suspect they are accurate given the sort of puff and nonsense they peddle on there. I still don't think being very successfull running a gossip site covers all of what running Yahoo! requires.

I always wonder why the type of accusation against DailyMail are never to be seen when it's about e.g The Guardian? Do people actually believe there is a distinction in quality between all these tabloids? As if Guardian would be of higher quality than Daily Mail? That can't be it? For every trash article you point out on the DM one could find the same from Guardian.

Snapshot: The current top headline at the Guardian's UK website concerns David Cameron facing MPs over his father's offshore bank account (exposed in the Panama Papers leak).

The current top news headline at the Daily Mail is something about Kate Middleton's $4200 dress.

This is pretty typical. I don't consider the Guardian the best journalism has to offer. But the Daily Mail is way more "tabloid-lite", with a huge amount of gossip and celebrity culture. The fluffy stories make the Daily Mail far closer to something like a full-on tabloid (like The Sun etc.) to me. It's not just editorial stance we are talking about.

A fate worse than death. I am a long time Yahoo user and email account holder. The thought of the Daily Mail tabloid having unfettered access to my private information fills me with horror.

Horrifying! My primary email account is also with Yahoo. I really hope this doesn't go through.

Horror enough to switch to www.fastmail.com ?

Yes, horrifying enough to switch to something else (perhaps fastmail). I would also delete all my data from Yahoo. Unfortunately I doubt that deleting it through the UI would guarantee physical removal from their servers.

--EDIT-- upon further consideration, I am just going to switch to something else ASAP. Hoping that Yahoo gets picked up by a responsible party is a risk I am no longer willing to take.

Fairly brilliant from the Daily Mails perspective if they can raise the cash. They are growing in the US/internationally (if I am not mistaken) and taking over the yahoo front page would supercharge their growth in news and fantasy sports. Add to that the ad-tech / ad-sales. Sell off any other potentially valuable assets (tumblr, flickr, ..) shutter the rest and have some massive layoffs.

Obviously an awful fate for Yahoo, though.

Sounds more like an awful fate for the people losing their jobs.

Under Meyer's tenure it's actually much worse: you don't know when you're going to lose your job. With DM, you know if you're in or you're out.

I have never enjoyed Yahoo. Even during their heyday I was an Altavista user, the search seemed to give much better results. Yahoo's website design always seemed to be extremely cluttered and hasn't really updated much since then.

Whenever I use their webmail half the time the page doesn't load. I get the sense that there are 100 unnecessary services running at any time. Their chat is dwarfed by a dozen competing products.

Their news offering is unnecessary. They don't offer new products. The entire site needs to be re-written. When you do that, why not just open an auxiliary company and redirect all of your users there?

What is the purpose of the Daily Mail buying them, what will that do? And why would anyone mind or care? The worst that will happen is nothing right.

I would mind and care. The Daily Mail is a sleeze journal. My guess is half the value would be unfettered access to email accounts. They would dig through all sorts of emails to find juicy news stories and photos. This is not a reputable or ethical journal -- they make up stories, publish disghusting articles and know no bounds.

To support this point: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/14/dail...

The Daily Mail are scum and it's disappointing that they're not in the HN banned sites list.

I don't think Hacked Off are a great decider of who is scum or not. The campaign is a Guardian proxy to protect rich and powerful celebrities and politicians from press investigations.

But that link isn't Hacked Off's subjective opinion - it's an objective list of breaches of the Editor's code of practice published by the Press Complaints Commission.

Why wouldn't daily mail just offer their own email service @dailymail.com? Surely that would be less expensive. I doubt there would be too much juicy news flowing through yahoo's email server.

Then again as you say, Daily Mail is pretty much a tabloid. I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. They might, on the other hand, monitor trends to see what people are talking about in general.

That I might believe.

Because yahoo mail offers a 20year treasure trove of email whereas a new email service would offer no such history. I, like many, started my first email account on Yahoo. It still lives, even though most current usage has migrated to gmail. Also, only a fool would use @dailymail as their primary account knowing the history of the paper's privacy violations.

> I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

The Daily Mail are a separate organization but I would not trust them to get up to exactly the same tricks.

They're buying pageviews/traffic for their content. According to Alexa[0], Yahoo is still the 5th-largest site globally and in the US. That's a pretty large amount of traffic. Assuming Wikipedia (at #7) gets ~765M monthly views [1], and Yahoo gets more than that, that's close to a billion monthly page views. Even if they do nothing other than switch out the Yahoo "relevant stories" algorithm to one that features more of their own, they can still extract a decent amount of value from that.

To your other point - as a consumer, I've personally never really enjoyed any Yahoo offering other than Flickr and fantasy sports. However, as a developer, I saw them do a whole lot of great stuff that they never followed through on. YUI [2] was the first UI framework I used, and was great for rapidly prototyping/developing a good-looking UI half a decade before Bootstrap was a thing. Yahoo Pipes [3] was a rather interesting experiment that sadly never really took off. YQL [4] evolved out of that, and is a pretty neat way to API-ify page scraping. I've used it in a couple small projects.

[0] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined...

[2] http://yuilibrary.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

[4] https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

Yahoo for me just means an email account that I hang on to because I have had it a long time and still use for the occasional thing.

It's a website which, as only an occasional visitor, seems to do its best to makes it awkward for me to find the email log-in. What I see while there seems to be flashy glitzy trivia that's of no interest to me at all.

tbh I can't understand why it's valuable.

EDIT: just visited now and the email was easier to find than I seem to remember

I still associate it with Crockford's JS series so there's at least some good will. The platform was always very odd (imo).

>why it's valuable.

The market has been valuing yahoo's core business at about $0 after you deduct the value of its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan shareholdings.

However the remainder can have value. At the moment they have income of about $4.6bn/year from adds and the like which is spent paying the wages of 10,400 employees. How many employees do you actually need to run a site like yahoo? They could probably cut back a good bit and be quite profitable.

Given that Yahoo owns Tumblr, Tumblr's userbase is largely liberal, and the Daily Mail is very right-wing, that's not gonna end well.

It is always interesting when most tech folks, even most business folks talk down Yahoo, as a relic of the internet of yesterday, a company with arguably the worlds biggest online news site can see value in Yahoo.

Whether you like the content on DM, they know how to be commercially successful in a difficult digital time, and might have interesting plans for Yahoo!

Time to kill off any old Yahoo accounts you might have.

It doesn't look like the Mail wants Yahoo Research, so that would probably end up owned by a private equity group who would naturally seek to extract the maximum value from it and its patents...

What's everyone after when acquiring Yahoo? I can't even think of a product outside of Flickr that they've done a decent job on. I started forwarding my Yahoo mail to Gmail because the mail client was always buggy and slow. Their online news is nothing but blatant reposts from NPR and AP. Their own "journalists" write mostly celebrity garbage. What is it at this point? Traffic?

I have so much internal confusion when it comes to Yahoo. I remember them as innovators, as the go-to search engine when I was a netscape-obsessed middle school student. I respected their site and work.

Now, I go to Yahoo and am just...disappointed. The front page has become a home for stale clickbait, and other areas of the site a home for hateful comments and obtuse advertising. I just think to myself "who the hell are they trying to appeal to, what am I looking at. Why don't I switch mail services already?"

I am used to their email, and still use it daily. I have been hoping to see Yahoo make some serious changes and be on the upswing for a number of years. If The Daily Mail touches Yahoo in any way, I would be finished with them, without hesitation, without question. That would be the death knell. And it doesn't appear I am alone in the sentiment.

Keeping the DM site up and snappy for so many users is no mean feat. Making an efficient digital workflow for users (journalists) who are quite picky consumers of IT solutions (I have my way of working and only my way)... The DM, technically speaking, is an impressive beast.

Perhaps this is a real story even though my gut says this has agenda written all over it.

What a sad end for Yahoo. The Daily Mail

I bet it won't be for $44 billion

Also worth noting that Microsoft wanted to pay half in shares which were worth on Feb 1st 2008 27.20 (post announcement - a huge drop!) - today they are worth 54.42 - almost exactly double.

This means that today if the deal had have gone through (and people kept their MS shares) in 2008, Y! shareholders would have assets worth ~$66bn.

I don't think this is a good idea. The Daily Mail is more tabloid. Yahoo is not a tabloid, and I think it would be a mistake to take it in that flippant, Gawkeresque direction.

> I don't think this is a good idea. The Daily Mail is more tabloid. Yahoo is not a tabloid, and I think it would be a mistake to take it in that flippant, Gawkeresque direction.

It's kind of a Tabloid where I live. But yes, it's not as bad as the DM. But Yahoo seems desperate to sell or it wouldn't even consider the offer.

Is all this due to Marissa Mayer's failure at the helm of Yahoo or is it just a logical business decision the shareholders made? Whats the backstory.

It'd probably allow the Daily Hate to steal people's copyrighted material from Flickr without having to ask. Not that they did before.

DMGT is a big group who owns lots of publications, like Euromoney.

Yahoo will be one among many.

Was going to say "that should end well" but the front page of yahoo already looks like the Daily Mail so maybe its a good fit.

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