Company Name: Yahoo!
Founders: David Filo and Jerry Yang.
Yahoo is a famous American web services provider and known to be one of the pioneers of the early internet era. Web portal services such as Yahoo search engine, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Mail, etc are provided by it.
In 2016, Yahoo was the most read media and news website according to web analytic providers such as Alexa and SimilarWeb with over 7 million views per month. In the same year, they also ranked as 6th among the most visited website. As of 2017, more than 8500 employees work for Yahoo. It is now owned by the Verizon Company and holds revenue of 5.17 billion. The headquarters of Yahoo are situated in Sunnyvale, California.
How It All Started
After graduating from Stanford University in 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to Worldwide Web’. It was then just a directory of some other websites which were organized in a hierarchy. In the month of March of the same year, it was renamed as ‘Yahoo’. On January 18th of the year 1995, the yahoo.com domain was created.
Launching
In the late 1990s, Yahoo grew rapidly and became one of the famous web portal providers. Yahoo took over the online communications company named Four11 in 1997. The webmail service of the company, Rocketmail was renamed as ‘Yahoo! Mail’. Yahoo also acquired the gaming website ClassicGmaes.com and turned it to ‘Yahoo Games’.
‘Yahoo! Pager’, an instant messaging service was launched by Yahoo in 1998 and was renamed as Yahoo Messenger after a year. ‘Yahoo! Groups’ was created after the company took over eGroups. Yahoo purchased the online blog site Tumblr on May 2013. Since the late 2000s, Yahoo has declined a bit but they are still one of the most popular domain websites in the world, ranking 8th according to Alexa.
Marketing Strategies and Reasons behind Its Success
Simple Interface: The web services are still new to many users around the world as a big part of the world are still developing and have got to know about the Internet just some years ago. Anything that is simple will attract new users. Keeping this in mind, the interface of Yahoo was made to be simple and easy to access. This actually has made the company gain a lot more users than some other new search engines.
Fast and Relevant: If someone is searching for something in a search engine, they will always want the search results to be relevant. Yahoo provides the exact thing. Searching in Yahoo is very easy, and it will provide the most relevant results to what you have searched in no time. Also, Yahoo supports more than 30 languages. So no matter which part of the world you belong, you can search for anything using your own language on Yahoo.
Pioneer: Yahoo is known to be one of the pioneers of the early internet era. It was one of the first to provide a search engine which gave information about many things. Because of this, Yahoo gained many users the early years of its launching and due to providing constant brilliant service; even now Yahoo is considered to be one of the biggest and most recognized companies with over 350 million users worldwide.
Product Portfolio: Yahoo provides various services such as ‘Yahoo! Messenger’, ‘Yahoo! Mail’, ‘Yahoo! Finance’, and ‘Yahoo! Sports’ etc. Thus with Yahoo, any user will be able to know about everything such as sports, finance, etc. The users also can be connected with friends and families through ‘Yahoo! Mobile’ which offers services like email, blogging, instant messaging, information services, etc. Also, shopping services are provided by Yahoo with ‘Yahoo! Shopping’, ‘Yahoo Autos’, etc, Providing everything under one name has made Yahoo to be one of the best.
Employee Strength: Yahoo has over 8500 people working under them as employees. The employees who work for Yahoo have the best qualification as well as the experience and trying to improve the search engine every day. Their constant hard work and dedication have made Yahoo successful.
Social Media Presence: Yahoo has a very strong social media presence. Their twitter page is extremely active and constantly provides its followers with everything that is happening out there in the world. As this is the era of Social Media, being this much active and interactive with the followers have made Yahoo more popular than it already was.
Advertising: Advertising is a big part of any business. Keeping this in mind, Yahoo Search Marketing provides various services such as Local Advertising or Sponsored Search. With these services, everyone who has started a business can advertise their services and products on Yahoo. As Yahoo is very popular, this will help their business grow as well as increase the popularity of Yahoo more.
Campaign
Yahoo released an ad campaign titled ‘Be a Better’ in 2007. This campaign was featured through multiple media services such as TV, radio, online and in cinema halls. With this campaign, Yahoo focused mainly on Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Mobile oneSearch. It was mainly started in the United States of America and later expanded globally. This fun and humorous campaign was very successful and gave Yahoo a better worldwide recognition.
In early November of 2018, Yahoo News released its latest ad campaign named ‘See All Sides’. These advertisements depicted opposing political ideologies by featuring red and blue colored images with phrases overlapping each other. According to Yahoo, these ads were released to reflect the political state of the USA as Yahoo News is a non-partisan news organization which wishes to provide divergent perspectives.
Conclusion
Since its inception, Yahoo has been one of the best and largest internet companies. Even after Google’s poetic rise, Yahoo has kept its high popularity intact and updating its users with quality news on a daily basis. Because of the dedication and hard works of the members of Yahoo, it always will be one of the most popular Web Portals in the world.
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