Yahoo's history began as a small Internet start-up. With the sale of its most important business units, it is now coming to an unspectacular end.
Yahoo, one of the first start-ups to successfully market the possibilities of the Internet, is going under. Hardly any observer of the Internet scene or stock analyst would have thought this development possible: After the sale of the core business to the US telecommunications giant Verizon, the name Yahoo disappears from the Internet. Instead, Yahoo's remaining web services will be marketed under the new name Altaba.
The beginnings in the mid-90s
Yahoo was founded back in 1994, shortly after the World Wide Web first went online. Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo, an intelligent search engine that brought order and efficiency to the Internet. In the late 1990s, Yahoo then developed further into a comprehensive Internet service provider. Users were then able to take advantage of functions such as mail accounts, news services and various other information and discussion portals in addition to the Internet search functions and the Web catalog. Due to its diverse and attractive offering, Yahoo quickly advanced to become one of the most popular Internet services during this period. Many users also installed Yahoo as their homepage.
However, shortly after the start of the new millennium, Yahoo began to lose popularity. Google and Facebook in particular rose significantly in favor among private and professional users in https://online-exness.com/login/. As a countermeasure, Yahoo bought shares in Tumblr, a platform for bloggers. In addition, the acquisition of shares in the Chinese trading portal Alibaba was supposed to halt the decline. However, this plan did not work out.
Revenge for mistakes in the area of data protection
Today, the trustworthiness of an Internet provider is its most important asset. However, Yahoo was unable to score points here in particular: The company scanned its users' mails and resold the data for advertising purposes. It also allowed the NSA to access its customers' address books. In 2016, Yahoo also fell victim to one of the biggest hacker attacks in history. That's why more and more users turned their backs on this provider and opted for alternatives that offered more protection of their data and privacy.
The rise and fall of Yahoo is reflected in the development of its share prices. The IPO took place in 1996 at an official issue price of $13. It was outperformed by more than 150 percent on the very first day of trading. Until the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo shares went through a steep upward trend. They reached their all-time high at the beginning of 2000 at just under USD 475. The share price then plummeted to 30 U.S. dollars in the same year and has not been able to return to its former level since.
Conclusion:
Yahoo had little to counter the overwhelming competition from Google and Facebook.
The sale of user data and inadequate protection against hacker attacks also led to a massive loss of customers.
Marissa Meyer failed in her attempt to turn the company around.
The buyer of the core business merges Yahoo's activities with those of AOL.
Eleena Timmons