
Daily Mail owner considering Yahoo bid - terryauerbach
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36011510
======
jimmytidey
The Yahoo brand has really positive associations for me, their company ethos
always seems to have been about good design, sharing with the developer
community, providing really useful services.

The Daily Mail is a horrible company that will stoop to any level to earn a
buck [1][2].

It seems like a terrible cultural fit and it would be a sad end to Yahoo.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133950)
[2] [http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-
blog/2013/01/daily-m...](http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-
blog/2013/01/daily-mail-turns-the-creepiness-up-a-notch.html)

~~~
bb101
Daily Mail may have questionable journalism, but when a large public-interest
story breaks, it is often the first to have large pictures of the story. As
they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

They also seem to be the first to cover category-B news, i.e. a light plane
crash in some distant country. As long as there are photos, the Daily Mail
will have it on their front page today, the Telegraph tomorrow, and the BBC
perhaps on the third day.

~~~
tim333
I also like that they allow comments and discussion on controversial stuff
like islamic terrorism. If you read the stories on the Guardian or NYT all
discussion tends to be banned in those areas in case someone says something
politically incorrect. I'm not sure trying to prevent people discussing the
issues makes them go away. I think stuff like that has led to it being "the
most visited English-language newspaper website in the world." As well as
Kardashian stories or course.

~~~
alva
My favourite line from the Guardian came when they realised that the vast
majority of their left-leaning readers strongly disagreed with them regarding
Islamic terrorism and the refugee crisis.

Closed comments on certain articles due to “a change in mainstream public
opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the
site”.[0]

At least they didn't even pretend that it wasn't because the majority of their
readership disagreed with them.

[0][http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers-
editor-on-readers-comments-below-the-line)

~~~
seivan
I didn't even know about this. Thank you. Saving it in case some mod removes
your comment. It goes to show the insane biases people have. I know Daily Mail
is trash. I also know Guardian is as well.

~~~
DanBC
I'm not a mod but I know they don't remove comments like that.

~~~
seivan
You sure try though.

------
binarymax
A fate worse than death. I am a long time Yahoo user and email account holder.
The thought of the Daily Mail tabloid having unfettered access to my private
information fills me with horror.

~~~
walkingolof
Horror enough to switch to www.fastmail.com ?

~~~
binarymax
Yes, horrifying enough to switch to something else (perhaps fastmail). I would
also delete all my data from Yahoo. Unfortunately I doubt that deleting it
through the UI would guarantee physical removal from their servers.

\--EDIT-- upon further consideration, I am just going to switch to something
else ASAP. Hoping that Yahoo gets picked up by a responsible party is a risk I
am no longer willing to take.

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mkohlmyr
Fairly brilliant from the Daily Mails perspective if they can raise the cash.
They are growing in the US/internationally (if I am not mistaken) and taking
over the yahoo front page would supercharge their growth in news and fantasy
sports. Add to that the ad-tech / ad-sales. Sell off any other potentially
valuable assets (tumblr, flickr, ..) shutter the rest and have some massive
layoffs.

Obviously an awful fate for Yahoo, though.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Sounds more like an awful fate for the people losing their jobs.

~~~
skylan_q
Under Meyer's tenure it's actually much worse: you don't know when you're
going to lose your job. With DM, you know if you're in or you're out.

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Kequc
I have never enjoyed Yahoo. Even during their heyday I was an Altavista user,
the search seemed to give much better results. Yahoo's website design always
seemed to be extremely cluttered and hasn't really updated much since then.

Whenever I use their webmail half the time the page doesn't load. I get the
sense that there are 100 unnecessary services running at any time. Their chat
is dwarfed by a dozen competing products.

Their news offering is unnecessary. They don't offer new products. The entire
site needs to be re-written. When you do that, why not just open an auxiliary
company and redirect all of your users there?

What is the purpose of the Daily Mail buying them, what will that do? And why
would anyone mind or care? The worst that will happen is nothing right.

~~~
TuringXYZ
I would mind and care. The Daily Mail is a sleeze journal. My guess is half
the value would be unfettered access to email accounts. They would dig through
all sorts of emails to find juicy news stories and photos. This is not a
reputable or ethical journal -- they make up stories, publish disghusting
articles and know no bounds.

~~~
Kequc
Why wouldn't daily mail just offer their own email service @dailymail.com?
Surely that would be less expensive. I doubt there would be too much juicy
news flowing through yahoo's email server.

Then again as you say, Daily Mail is pretty much a tabloid. I think grabbing
specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. They might, on the
other hand, monitor trends to see what people are talking about in general.

That I might believe.

~~~
TrickedOut
Because yahoo mail offers a 20year treasure trove of email whereas a new email
service would offer no such history. I, like many, started my first email
account on Yahoo. It still lives, even though most current usage has migrated
to gmail. Also, only a fool would use @dailymail as their primary account
knowing the history of the paper's privacy violations.

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barking
Yahoo for me just means an email account that I hang on to because I have had
it a long time and still use for the occasional thing.

It's a website which, as only an occasional visitor, seems to do its best to
makes it awkward for me to find the email log-in. What I see while there seems
to be flashy glitzy trivia that's of no interest to me at all.

tbh I can't understand why it's valuable.

EDIT: just visited now and the email was easier to find than I seem to
remember

~~~
tim333
>why it's valuable.

The market has been valuing yahoo's core business at about $0 after you deduct
the value of its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan shareholdings.

However the remainder can have value. At the moment they have income of about
$4.6bn/year from adds and the like which is spent paying the wages of 10,400
employees. How many employees do you actually need to run a site like yahoo?
They could probably cut back a good bit and be quite profitable.

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WillKirkby
Given that Yahoo owns Tumblr, Tumblr's userbase is largely liberal, and the
Daily Mail is very right-wing, that's not gonna end well.

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askyourmother
It is always interesting when most tech folks, even most business folks talk
down Yahoo, as a relic of the internet of yesterday, a company with arguably
the worlds biggest online news site can see value in Yahoo.

Whether you like the content on DM, they know how to be commercially
successful in a difficult digital time, and might have interesting plans for
Yahoo!

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nxzero
Time to kill off any old Yahoo accounts you might have.

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peterclary
It doesn't look like the Mail wants Yahoo Research, so that would probably end
up owned by a private equity group who would naturally seek to extract the
maximum value from it and its patents...

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sakopov
What's everyone after when acquiring Yahoo? I can't even think of a product
outside of Flickr that they've done a decent job on. I started forwarding my
Yahoo mail to Gmail because the mail client was always buggy and slow. Their
online news is nothing but blatant reposts from NPR and AP. Their own
"journalists" write mostly celebrity garbage. What is it at this point?
Traffic?

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altotrees
I have so much internal confusion when it comes to Yahoo. I remember them as
innovators, as the go-to search engine when I was a netscape-obsessed middle
school student. I respected their site and work.

Now, I go to Yahoo and am just...disappointed. The front page has become a
home for stale clickbait, and other areas of the site a home for hateful
comments and obtuse advertising. I just think to myself "who the hell are they
trying to appeal to, what am I looking at. Why don't I switch mail services
already?"

I am used to their email, and still use it daily. I have been hoping to see
Yahoo make some serious changes and be on the upswing for a number of years.
If The Daily Mail touches Yahoo in any way, I would be finished with them,
without hesitation, without question. That would be the death knell. And it
doesn't appear I am alone in the sentiment.

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CraigJPerry
Keeping the DM site up and snappy for so many users is no mean feat. Making an
efficient digital workflow for users (journalists) who are quite picky
consumers of IT solutions (I have my way of working and only my way)... The
DM, technically speaking, is an impressive beast.

Perhaps this is a real story even though my gut says this has agenda written
all over it.

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ed_blackburn
What a sad end for Yahoo. The Daily Mail

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carlton
I bet it won't be for $44 billion

~~~
andy_ppp
Also worth noting that Microsoft wanted to pay half in shares which were worth
on Feb 1st 2008 27.20 (post announcement - a huge drop!) - today they are
worth 54.42 - almost exactly double.

This means that today if the deal had have gone through (and people kept their
MS shares) in 2008, Y! shareholders would have assets worth ~$66bn.

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Overtonwindow
I don't think this is a good idea. The Daily Mail is more tabloid. Yahoo is
not a tabloid, and I think it would be a mistake to take it in that flippant,
Gawkeresque direction.

~~~
spriggan3
> I don't think this is a good idea. The Daily Mail is more tabloid. Yahoo is
> not a tabloid, and I think it would be a mistake to take it in that
> flippant, Gawkeresque direction.

It's kind of a Tabloid where I live. But yes, it's not as bad as the DM. But
Yahoo seems desperate to sell or it wouldn't even consider the offer.

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kiproping
Is all this due to Marissa Mayer's failure at the helm of Yahoo or is it just
a logical business decision the shareholders made? Whats the backstory.

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andy_ppp
It'd probably allow the Daily Hate to steal people's copyrighted material from
Flickr without having to ask. Not that they did before.

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Shorel
DMGT is a big group who owns lots of publications, like Euromoney.

Yahoo will be one among many.

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ck2
Was going to say "that should end well" but the front page of yahoo already
looks like the Daily Mail so maybe its a good fit.

