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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Why is Yahoo even still around? They got rid of search. They got rid of the directory. They sold Alibaba. What are they still doing, if anything?

Verizon may be getting out of content. With antitrust regulation picking up, it's quite likely that telcos will be required to get out of the content business. Historically, the US made movie companies stop owning movie theaters, and car companies stop owning dealers. Although Yahoo is now such a loser that it's hard to make an antitrust case against Verizon owning them. AT&T and DirectTV, though...

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Yahoo still makes billions in revenue every year. And the vast majority is not from finance or sports.

Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.

Have anything to back that up? I find it very hard to believe. Even the boomers I know don't ever use it. Is Yahoo popular in some other country?

https://www.alexa.com/topsites

Yahoo.com, rank 12, Reddit.com, rank 19.

I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is notoriously mismanaged, so it's actually quite an appropriate comparison. Reddit is just culturally more relevant :-)

> I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is notoriously mismanaged

That's what an MBA would say.

Alexa is a terrible way to compare traffic on websites. Their data is biased towards people who run Windows and are willing to run their toolbar.

I know for sure that it has always massively undercounted reddit traffic for example but I'll bet it is fairly accurate for Yahoo, since "runs Windows and random toolbars" is their target audience.

While I agree with your assessment, some data is better than no data.

Plus my main point was that Yahoo is still a huge site. Maybe not in our circles, but a lot of people use it.

> monetizes those users far more effectively.

Citation needed.

I got my Yahoo Mail address in 1996 because teenage me thought my address @yahoo.com would be so cool. Nowadays I use it just for online shops, etc (I also use it for Facebook, which is a bad idea, because online shops upload their customer info to Facebook and, tada, guess whose profile matches for targetted advertising). Today I logged in and a stupid ad popped up (I wish I can remember what it was for). When I do a password reset on one of these shops, Yahoo also recognizes those kinds of emails and recommends LastPass or whatever password service they bought.

Incidentally, they've also lost all my mail from before year 2001, when I actually use them for personal communications, meaning all those emails are now lost (well maybe I have a backup somewhere...). What a fucking useless company.

I helped a person get back into their yahoo mail account and the web interface showed auto playing video ads with sound. I recommended they get a different account or at least use IMAP to check mail, but they were not interested.

I was scrolling down the comments to see if someone has this problem...they lost my mail too. No way to recover it then, huh? This is sad.

I had this unfortunate realization the other day as well.

It seems like if you haven't used it in 12 months they just delete all your old emails. No warning whatsoever.

Verizon, as part of their ownership of Yahoo and AOL, controls a significant proportion of email inboxes. There is quite a lot of strategic value in that. They've been particularly bad, from my perspective, in terms of allowing our emails to get through, but I shudder at the thought of email being under 90% control by Google.

There are actually many quality yahoo products, not yahoo sports and yahoo finance are very widely used. Yahoo finance is a mini Bloomberg terminal at this point.

This would be my gut reaction, but for whatever it’s worth, and however they create this metric: Alexa says they’re #11 in “global internet engagement”.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

(Again, whatever that means.)

But I think they have a few valuable properties. Sports. Finance. And for whatever reason, the old folks in my family love their Yahoo Weather app.

Their fantasy sports platform?

Shutdown Corner has been my favorite source of reasoned NFL power rankings for the last seven years if that counts for anything.

Yahoo as a brand is probably still worth something. Its a grand father from dotcom bubble that people still recognized. Yahoo still provided a lot of services that people use like Yahoo email for example.

That's a depreciating item, perhaps rapidly so, now that more and more users aren't people who were alive during the dotcom boom.

> Yahoo email for example

The only reason I get yahoo email is because there was a vulnerability a few years ago and everyone's account got broken into.

I think Yahoo is still relevant in Japan

Yahoo Japan is a separate company. They are definitely still relevant though.

and no groups.

I think my friend uses it for news.

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