
Facebook Overtakes Yahoo: Now the Second Most Visited Site in U.S. - Concours
http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/facebook-unseats-yahoo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
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yurisagalov
Every so often an article crops up discussing Yahoo's popularity, and I am
again and again amazed at the fact that so many people still visit Yahoo in
general. I haven't used their portal since late 1999, and I don't know many
other people who do. There are a few ancient relics out there who still use
yahoo mail, but even they seem to be fewer and further between (somehow gmail
just appears to be more...professional, My friends would put gmail on their
resume, but would not be caught dead with a yahoo mail account... it is akin
to a hotmail account for professional purposes)...

I would _really_ love to see a thorough study of yahoo demographics and
traffic driven, as well as how much of it is actually through partnerships (in
Canada, Rogers partners with yahoo, so they kind of force feed you a lot of
their services through the yahoo portals) and not direct yahoo traffic.

~~~
seldo
As an ex-Yahoo (I quit this week), I can tell you our demographic in two
words: flyover country.

Here's a demographic study on Google vs. Yahoo from 2 years ago:
[http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-
hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_...](http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-
hopkins/2008/02/yahoo_search_draws_younger_aud.html)

Google's big groups: affluent suburbia, upscale America, rich small towns. In
short: you, probably.

Yahoo's big groups: struggling societies, blue-collar backbone, remote
America. In short: middle America (and also poorer urban folks).

Within Yahoo, the general consensus is that our biggest market is middle-aged
housewives from the midwest. This is a big group, although as the study points
out we actually trend younger than Google -- this is because our media
properties, likes games, sports, and IM, attract teenagers, a market Google
doesn't really serve.

While a certain amount of traffic is driven through partnerships, it's nowhere
near big enough to account for Yahoo's enormous volume. Although they're not
new or cool, properties like the Yahoo.com frontpage, Yahoo News (bigger than
CNN and the NYTimes combined), Sports (bigger than ESPN), Finance (by far the
biggest) and Mail (40% of the market) absolutely dominate their respective
categories and, despite the general perception of Yahoo as a company in
decline, are mostly holding steady or growing slowly in terms of audience.

The selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is
a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply
put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they
believe _nobody_ uses our products.

It simply isn't true. Yahoo isn't growing as fast as Facebook -- hence being
overtaken -- but it's still growing and attracting new users every day, both
domestically and worldwide. It's just not doing so in a particularly new or
exciting way.

~~~
swombat
_The selection bias amongst tech professionals in their perception of Yahoo is
a huge barrier to Yahoo's hiring, acquisition, and new tech launches -- simply
put, the tech community doesn't use our products, and as a result, they
believe nobody uses our products._

Is that not considered worth fixing by the Yahoo leadership? Having good
support from early adopters seems pretty important when you're a tech
company...

~~~
elblanco
Yahoo is old enough and big enough now that it's worth it for them to consider
becoming a GE or a Walmart. Ubiquitous with everybody _but_ early adopters.
And I know that plenty of very good engineers work at GE (and Walmart
corporate for that matter, their transaction volume and business intelligence
systems are insane).

~~~
joshu
Unfortunately, the notion that Yahoo management could decide to do something
and then do it makes me laugh and laugh.

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moultano
[http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo,+facebook&ctab=0&ge...](http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo,+facebook&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

~~~
JacobAldridge
[http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo%2C+facebook%2C+facebook+log...](http://google.com/trends?q=yahoo%2C+facebook%2C+facebook+login&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

~~~
Raphael
<http://google.com/trends?q=facebook+login,+login>

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ivankirigin
"In the first month of 2010 ... Facebook’s traffic rose to 133.62 million
visitors" <http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/facebook-unseats-yahoo/>

"More than 400 million active users"
<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

~~~
robryan
Surprisingly enough the US isn't the only country in the world :P

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ivankirigin
Ohh yeah, I forgot Compete was US only. How especially useless.

For Tipjoy, Compete tracked each site that had our javascript or iframe. So
any widget company is being extremely over counted.

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godDLL
Hey, people are primarily interested in other people. Go figure.

