Just wondering, how many people use Yahoo? It's supposed to be getting more popular but at least with my peers I don't see that trend. Is it popular outside of the USA?
A lot of those people haven't had any good reason to switch to anything else, so that's what they use. This tracks with the way people choose offline brands like toothpaste and such -- once people get used to buying a brand, most of them tend to stick with it until they have a clear reason to change.
That's actually why the transition to mobile is so crucial for them -- those people still want to keep up with sports and weather and everything else on their phones, but they're more likely to use an app than a website. If Yahoo loses their userbase in the transition to mobile, those users are probably never coming back.
You asked about international: the (mostly independent) Yahoo Japan is huge and always has been; my wife and many of her friends use it as their homepage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
Apparently Yahoo is the "2nd largest search directory on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%".
- First of all, wow, what a landslide! - Secondly, Yahoo still has a pretty big slice of that pie relative to everyone else. - Super surprising that Google owns 85% of the search market, yet is still behind Yahoo on traffic :/