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Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

nytimes.com

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Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#91

Post by MrApathy »

fluxquanta wrote: post #29
plinkplonk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months" (Genuine question, not snark). Why "sadly"? Companies, even technical companies, get obsolescent and die all the time. Maybe it is just Yahoo's time to go.

I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet. Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.

As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo.

I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of magnitude web pages to crawl and SEO/spam hadn't yet taken off, but even still the AV results weren't always useful. Without page rank or a decent sorting algorithm, I remember often going through pages of results.

Yahoo had it all: games, continuously updated stock quotes (at a time when I would look up share prices in the morning's paper, priced to the nearest eighth of a dollar), weather, news, and hand picked results from around the web. It was all I was previously getting from CompuServe/Prodigy, but at no cost.

But now I haven't visited Yahoo in years. It's like when your favorite teenage band breaks up. You're a little sad, but you've moved on. The fond memories are for life.

Edited to add: we all used a home page back then because tabs hadn't yet been invented, meaning the restore previously opened tabs option that we all use today also didn't exist. One's home page had a much greater importance back then.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#92

Post by brewdad »

username223 wrote: post #82

When Yahoo finally dies, my main concern is what happens to the @yahoo.com email address I've had for a couple of decades, and which now lives next to my name in countless address books. Does it perpetually forward to an address I choose? Does Yahoo try to charge for this? Do Russian identity thieves buy the domain and make my life hell?

I've got a list of maybe 50 accounts including a couple of relatively important ones that still use my Yahoo address. It's been on my todo list for months to get them updated. I guess it's time to bump up the priority on that item.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#93

Post by BinaryIdiot »

jknightco wrote: post #77
lmm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is. A lot of Google's advertising business is selling ads on other people's sites, and they use the information from their search engine to target that; they could run the ad business without it (using data from Google Analytics and elsewhere) - after all it ran as an independent business when Doubleclick owned it. My understanding is that if search and ads were separate businesses and ads paid search for s…

According to their 10K [1] 76% of their advertising revenue and 68% of their total revenue comes from advertising on Google properties. Reducing their revenue by 76% surely wouldn't allow them to "run the ad business without it." [1] Page 24, https://investor.google.com/pdf/20141231_google_10K.pdf

> 76% of their advertising revenue and 68% of their total revenue comes from advertising on Google properties. Reducing their revenue by 76% surely wouldn't allow them to "run the ad business without it."

While I don't agree with the parent you're implying that search is the ONLY Google property that displays ads but that's not true. A decent percentage of that is coming from gmail. I'm not sure how much however.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#94

Post by bby »

pmlnr wrote: post #61
jscheel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing we are either going to see major changes in pricing structure, or a shutdown of Flickr. Pretty bummed.

Flickr has an immense historical value being the first large photo portal. I'd be devastated to see pictures nowhere else can be found going away :(

scrape it brother

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#97

Post by BinaryIdiot »

benmorris wrote: post #10

I never understood farming out their search engine to Bing in the first place. Google literally prints money with their adwords search business. Seems instead of attempting to innovate they just threw in the towel and gave up? I just find it hard to believe that Google is the only way you can run a successful search engine.

You seem to imply that because they used Bing they couldn't still make money from ad revenue with searching. The truth is they most certainly could and probably do (they display Google ads on their result pages). Outsourcing to Bing allowed them to, supposedly, focus on more core business related functions. Whether that was a mistake or not (or ultimately didn't matter) I don't know if we have the data to show.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#98

Post by bby »

swingbridge wrote: post #13
yeukhon wrote: post #4

Can someone explain why do business like to create new company? What are the benefits for the financial return other than having a book reporting individual revenue? In the end, aren't they going to be under the same parent company, which, if one wishes, can actually challenge and even overrule the child company CEO's decision behind the scene? HP, Google, now Yahoo.

Sometimes companies have one business that's doing quite well and another that's a real stinker. Shareholders may want to own the good business separately and let the market value that without the drag and risk of having the stinker weighing down on it. In the end the stinker is either dismantled, taken into bankruptcy or sold off. In Yahoo's case it's a bit unique in that the only thing they really have that the mar…

It has positive value if you assume full taxation on alibaba.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#99

Post by BinaryIdiot »

pmlnr wrote: post #60
voltagex_ wrote: post #24

Again I ask, where should I take ~30GB of photos that I have on Flickr? Yes, I have other backups but I need offsite storage. Guess I'll have to budget for it now. Backblaze B2 isn't quite ready yet.

Serious answer: digitalocean gives you a 40GB VPS for 20$/m and you can spin up an Owncloud instance in minutes.

A single VPS for backing up photos? No thanks. Redundancy is going to cost you a lot going this route.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#100

Post by function_seven »

plinkplonk wrote: post #19
chollida1 wrote: post #17

Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alone believed. Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. Heck Bloomberg just sent me a note saying the sentiment of the news on Yahoo was very positive, even the machines like this news:) Sadly this probably means 3 things are going…

"Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months" (Genuine question, not snark). Why "sadly"? Companies, even technical companies, get obsolescent and die all the time. Maybe it is just Yahoo's time to go.

That's true, but just like when people die—even when it's their time—it can be sad. I haven't used Yahoo in months, but like my sibling comment, it was a large part of introducing me to the web and what was possible.
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