
When Yahoo Reigned Supreme - ghosh
http://priceonomics.com/when-yahoo-reigned-supreme/
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DrBazza
I'm old enough to remember gopher, then mosaic, then netscape navigator, and a
web that had only a few dozen sites. Then there was altavista and metacrawler,
and of course yahoo. In our (physics) department of 20 people back in the 90s
and 00s, no-one ever used yahoo: its 'directory' listing of websites never sat
well with any of us, and we never used it: it just felt wrong and cumbersome.
In fact the longer yahoo stayed around the more we joked about it. I am still
astonished yahoo is still around now, I always felt it was doomed to failure
back in the 90s.

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n0us
I wonder if we will be reading this site in 10 years (or its successor) and
see a title "When Facebook Reigned Supreme" about how a monolithic social
network was seen as a gateway to everything having to do with your friends and
interests.

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stcredzero
Facebook can exploit the network effect. Yahoo, not so much. However, whenever
Facebook will be dethroned, it will be because it has become "infrastructure"
people take for granted.

Is it just me, or does the graph of VC investment look like fading ripples?

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shams93
Yeah Facebook is able to leverage peer pressure in a big way, yahoo had email
but with facebook messenger if you cancel out you lose access to communication
with a lot of people. Not even google was able to make a dent in facebook,
google plus turned into a broken joke.

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deciplex
It didn't help that when the buzz and hype was greatest for Google Plus
they... didn't let people join Google Plus without a difficult-to-obtain
invite. By the time they cut that out nobody gave a shit anymore.

Turns out Cartman's "you can't come" technique doesn't work so well IRL.

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randomThoughts9
It worked for GMail though.

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deciplex
Yeah, it did get some buzz going iirc. Gmail doesn't rely on network effects
tho.

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golfer
This article is from 2014. A few things have changed since then. For example,
Google now does offer ads in the Play Store:
[http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-
on-...](http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-play.html)

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filvdg
People seem to forget that overture (bought by yahoo) was the first to do SEA
in auction model like google does now

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Overtonwindow
I miss the old Yahoo TV commercials. Those were fun.

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k__
I never understood the main selling point of Yahoo.

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toast0
Yahoo was a gateway to doing more or less everything you could do on the
Internet. With a single account and familiar user experience. You could play
games, email, read the news, buy and sell things (stores, auctions, shopping),
chat, search, plan travel, share files, have a home page, send money, have a
pet (do you remember Yahoo! Mash? neither does anyone else) or find a pet,
find somewhere to live, get internet service, listen to music / watch music
videos, call your mom, etc, etc, etc.

In 2004 when I went through employee orientation, the company had a clear
goal: be a the top 3 online site in as many categories as possible. When I
left in 2011, nobody knew what they wanted to do. Now they don't even know how
to put a ! after their name!

~~~
k__
2004? Interesting. I thought their prime time was earlier.

I started using the Web in 2001 and didn't have much to do with Yahoo.

On the other hand, we had something like Yahoo in German, called "web.de" they
were pretty big back then. So I got my infos from Google, my mails from
"web.de" and the rest from MySpace haha.

Anyway, Yahoo seemed old school even when I started back then.

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grillvogel
it's still a pretty big deal in japan, but it's unclear how much of that is a
result of the ymobile cat.

