They were the wrong types of acquisitions. She, like Armstrong at AOL, tried to turn the company into a digital magazine with a social networking layer, but was never really able to surface high quality content above their shitty aggregated articles. I never ever felt a compelling desire to visit yahoo to read their content. She shut down way too many products. What she could have been doing is buying the successors to yahoo offerings, and netflixing yahoo (creating an entirely new product type to replace your existing service.) Yahoo seriously needed to stop playing catch-up and start playing leap-frog. They were too concerned with being a metoo, while Google/Facebook/Apple are still trying to be the NEXT BIG THING.
I could have made better acquisitions if yahoo had handed me a war chest.
Yahoo Finance
- https://openfolio.com/ (a way to make investing social and competitive)
- https://www.robinhood.com/ (mobile first stock trading)
- http://www.sparkfin.com/ (curated stock portfolios)
- http://www.forcerank.com/ (fantasy stock market)
- these 4 teams together would be an amazing Yahoo Finance 2.0, been in direct competition with motif investing AND offer a free fantasy layer to let people tip their toes in the water, or bet on stock market knowledge/intuition. would be a great way to get Finance people interested in Fantasy and vice versa.
Yahoo Messenger
- first thing to do before ANY acquisitions, would have been to let you open messenger chats at the bottom of ANY yahoo web property, ala facebook chat.
- can you imagine yahoo Finance/Fantasy/Flickr/Publishing/Local/Tumblr/Groups/Answers all being relevant AND having one consistent chat&annotation experience across all the properties.
- how did they not gently push a modern Messenger onto the tumblr crowd to let them chat realtime. Reddit is being similarly "stupid" and letting their userbase go offsite to irc/slack to have live discussions (but at least for reddit it makes sense to want everyone to use comments and not hide good content in live chat logs.)
- obviously WeChat/FBMessenger are the way of the future with regard to Chat being THE interface to the rest of your services. "Yahoo Messenger 2 Alpha" is a great place to experimentally compete with the Aviate group to be the "one launcher to access everything." FB hiring David Marcus as CEO of Messenger should have been a shot across Yahoo's bow, a wake up call, to hire a payment processing person to run messenger. Competing with Venmo within messenger is a strategy must. being able to access shopping, product reviews, and order things from within the Chat Interface is absolutely necessary.
Publishing
- https://launch.blendle.com/ (paywall middleman, to compete with google amp vs facebook instant articles)
- https://atavist.com/ (publishing platform to compete with medium/wordpress)
- http://www.ranker.com/ (huge huge repository of data)
- https://redef.com/ https://longform.org/ (human curation at its best)
- yahoo really lost one of its niches, paying people to write articles. A blendle/atavist merger would make them an instant player against wordpress and medium and kinja before implosion. I would have let a merged version of those two companies completely replace the old Yahoo Contributor Network. probably would rename it Yahoo Writer.
- http://genius.com/ or https://hypothes.is/ to compete with reddit/facebook/disqus as the discussion metalayer laid on top of content.
Verticals/writingtalent
- http://thewirecutter.com/ http://thesweethome.com/ (modern consumer reports, affiliate clicks. Would go well with blendle/atavist/ranker. Let consumers contribute reviews, rank the reviews. This could be a good way to reinvent Yahoo Shopping & integrate with the publishing/advertising platforms. pit your own paid in house writing staff against the community)
- http://www.seriouseats.com/ (both content for a lifestyle vertical, and selling kitchenware like sweethome. could also experiment with premium content subscriptions like cooks illustrated/americas test kitchen, because we now own blendle)
- http://birthmoviesdeath.com/ http://thedissolve.com/ http://www.cinephiliabeyond.org/ http://brightlightsfilm.com/ (first rate movie criticism)
- http://www.theonion.com/ (should never have let univision make this purchase)
- https://theconversation.com/us (adopting a high quality, not for profit writing center, and offering to host it on your new publishing platform would have been a demonstration of confidence in the product. also a tax writeoff)
Pipes
- doubled down 10 fold on Yahoo Pipes, and letting people remix the web. make it easier to use, directly compete with Flipboard, Feedly, Nuzzle, Wordpress, Reddit.
- the redef/longform/ranker teams would work here too. you would need people liking/following content ala Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. People would be able to subscribe to content, and mix up feeds.
- communities aggregating content ala subreddits. give logged out users the ability to browse through the best Pipes.
- collaborative pipes built by teams of people. forking was already a feature. team moderation and powerstructure management.
Flickr
- http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...
- she really should have tried harder to go after both the instagram and smugmug markets at the same time.
Fantasy
- i havent investigated this market because yahoo/espn/cbs/nfl own it, but yahoo fantasy mobile is covered in ads, and a terrible experience imho. I would make Fantasy a PRIME focus along with Finance and Flickr and actual Publishing tech/businessmodels.
- https://www.fantasypros.com/ (although this falls into the Publishing/Verticals realm, statistical meta analysis would give them a leg above all competition. jk there isnt much competition here)
Movies
- https://metacritic.com/ (like fantasypros but for movies. acquiring metacritic from CBS might be hard, but the synergy between metacritic, ranker.com, and publishing would be huge.)
- https://letterboxd.com/ (a movie social network to compete with imdb)
- wigglehop (gone, but the best local movie time browser)
- build an inhouse fandango competitor within wigglehop. build integration between Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Local and Yahoo Groups (local film critic meetups)
Yahoo Local
- tons of opportunity to compete with both yelp/foursquare AND facebookpages/squarespace. This is a place where yahoo could actually innovate and make a new way to find places to eat/visit, while at the same time offering page building for businesses. NO one yet has standardized menus and let me follow them for updates. It now looks like Apple Maps will be jumping into this market instead. Missed opportunity for Yahoo to be relevant.
- http://www.meetup.com/ (an interesting way to enter the local space and compete with IAC dating services without being a dating service. people are lonely and want human social interactions)
Yahoo Groups/Answers
- huge opportunity here to compete with Facebook Groups and Reddit. look how many facebook groups are dedicated to hyperlocal buying/selling. groups would be a good place to explore a futuristic synergy between chat, annotation (genius), content surfacing (ranker), local, and shopping.
Yahoo Aviate
- my vision for this would be to compete with Google Play services & Google App Streaming. you download Aviate, it lets you demo/stream all the other yahoo apps, and if you like them you can cache a local copy. kind of like build to offline vdi. maybe forking cyanogenmod or experimenting in the facebook home market could pay off. Microsoft is making too much headway into injecting itself into android, yahoo needs to be more aggressive.
Mail
- people hate email, find a way to reinvent email ala Google Inbox. this task probably requires hiring a proven leader and giving them full autonomy, instead of the integrations i describe for other company parts.
- alternatively do something crazy and buy slack.
Marketing/Advertising Tech
- this one is hard to know who to acquire, but a proven player is probably the better move. I am thinking something akin to microsoft buying parature and letting it continue to exist. as weird as it sounds, buying AOL probably would have made lots of sense. AOL made good marketing tech acquisitions, including gravity.
- hubspot is worth going after either through acquisition or cloning. goes well with helping small business in the Local space above, competes with etsy, fbpages, squarespace. people need an easy way to spin up local and global digital businesses. maybe i am suicidal thinking its a good idea to butt heads with oracle/sap/salesforce/microsoft in this arena, but small businesses are are a neglected market.
(there is still time for investors to go back on selling yahoo, and make it truly relevant and first class destination again. I am available for the CEO/strategy/acquisition-analyst position.)