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A searchable directory of
websites, founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, two stanford university graduates, in 1994. It started
life as a simple collection of their own bookmarks, and rapidly grew to
become the massive resource it is today, with hundreds of thousands of sites
and millions of pages. Yahoo organises the web by category rather than
search keyword, using teams of editors to sift though sites and put them in
the appropriate boxes. The success of its approach is reflected in the
phenomenal traffic it generates. At the end of 2001 Yahoo's website was
generating over 1.3 billion page views every day, which is one of the
reasons it continues to be so attractive to advertisers. Much of its traffic
comes from people attracted by the portal facilities on offer, including
chat, e-mail and auctions.
In contrast to many internet companies,
Yahoo consistently made a profit during the early years of the dotcom boom.
But in 2001 it suffered from the decline in advertising markets, losing $93m
and some of its lustre at the same time. Its multituted of advertising and
promotional deals has generated a revenue stream that competitors such as
Excite and lycos have struggled to much. The company has been highly
acquisitive in recent years, successfully completing the purchase of the
Geocities online community and pursuing a buy-out of broadcast.com, an
aggregator of content based on streaming media. More recently it bought
Inktomi, one of the first search-engine companies.
Filo and Yang are also unusual in that they have managed to retain
substantial stakes in the company they founded, and their combined worth is
regularly measured in billions of dollars. Nevertheless, like all other
internet companies Yahoo's value has fluctuated considerably, and the
company reported a flattening of revenue in 2001 as the advertising market
on which its revenue depends slowed dramatically. Big staff lay-offs
werefollowed by the departure of ceo Tim Koogle, who was replaced by Terry
Semel, a Hollywood veteran. But its cost-reducing strategy appears to have
paid off. In combination with new revenue sources such as customised and
business e-mail, for which the company now charges, it posted profits again
in 2002. |
