Hacker News Reader

Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of Yahoo at all anymore? Finance? I am at a loss of what it is they still even do.

They target and serve ads. Yahoo is still a key piece of Verizon's strategy for making money from internet advertising. Verizon, as a wireless carrier, knows where you are most of the time, and the various internet properties of the Verizon Media Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Media) know a lot about what you do online.

Run a pretty damn good implementation of Fantasy Sports.

Not sure about how the rest of the company does, but in the iOS App Store, the Gmail app has 147K reviews and Yahoo Mail has 2.1M reviews. I think that's a decent proxy to tell us that Yahoo Mail is _hugely_ popular still.

Reviews costing a dime a dozen i don't really think it's a valuable indicator of success, use or quality.

Fake App Store reviews cost $0.50-2.00 each, roughly.

And they are very difficult to hide at that scale.

Obviously it depends on where you purchase your review service so it's hard to give definitive prices, but I'm looking at a listing offering 1-2K AS review bundles for $150-$200, which averages between 10 and 15 cents. No idea on the quality, but IMO it doesn't look like fake reviews often try to hide themselves.

Note that app developers can choose to "reset" their reviews whenever they publish a new release, so those numbers might not be representative of the number of users each has.

The number of reviews can also depend heavily on whether and how often the app asks a user to review it.

Do you need an app from the store for either of those things on iOS? Seems like something the built-in mail would handle fine (and in all probability, better).

Thats weird because I have a Yahoo account that I manage through gmail... I am not sure how that works haha.

My Yahoo! is still useful. That's my customized web portal (I know, antiquated word), where I collect and access my RSS feeds. I also use Yahoo Mail and get my sports updates from Yahoo Sports.

Apparently Yahoo is still big in some parts of Asia, like in Japan for example.

As for the rest of the world, I don't see the point of Yahoo anymore.

Yahoo Japan has nothing to do with the American Yahoo tho... It looks beautiful btw: https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ - still using the old look.

"In 2017, Verizon Communications purchased the core internet business of America-based Yahoo!, and merged them into Oath, Inc. Yahoo! Japan was not affected. It continued as a joint venture between Softbank and what remained of Yahoo! Inc., renamed Altaba."

more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Japan

Notably, prior to its acquisition Yahoo! (America) had a 35% stake in Yahoo! Japan along with 24% of Alibaba. Even while Yahoo! was independent and turning a profit, it was valued as an albatross dragging down Yahoo! Japan's prospects to the tune of about negative $4 billion.

People were suggesting that a holding company should be broken out to manage all three entities without doing any business of its own, so that Yahoo's terrible prospects couldn't cut into the value of the other two. (Since an independent business can't be worse than worthless to shareholders, it would have immediately switched to a positive valuation.) Instead, the market skipped a step, divesting the functional businesses to enable a positive-value acquisition of the remains.

What's fascinating is that Yahoo! Japan does something very similar to Yahoo! America, but one of the two profitable businesses was valuable while the other was understood to be doomed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-04-17/how-ca...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com