Yahoo! Inc. was an American multinational technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, was CEO and president of Yahoo from July 2012 until June 2017.
It was globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its height, it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! was the highest-read news and media website, with over seven billion views per month, being the sixth most visited website globally in 2016 According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visited Yahoo websites every month. Yahoo itself claimed it attracted "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages".
Once the most popular website in the U.S., Yahoo slowly started to decline since the late 2000s, and on February 21, 2017, Verizon Communications announced its intent to acquire old Yahoo's internet business (excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan) for $4.48 billion—the company was once valued at over $100 billion. Before the transaction was completed, the company expected to change its name to Altaba Inc. Verizon completed its acquisition of the old iteration of Yahoo! Inc's internet business on June 13, 2017. Verizon announced that the old Yahoo! Inc's internet assets would be combined under a new subsidiary, Oath, which later became known as Verizon Media in 2019 and eventually renamed to the current iteration of Yahoo! Inc. in 2021.
History
Founding
In January 1994, Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web".. yhoo.client.shareholder.com The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!", the human-edited Yahoo! Directory, provided for users to surf through the internet, being their first product and original purpose.The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close September 26, 2014, retrieved in June 3, 2017Yahoo schließt seinen Katalog from golem.de, September 27, 2014, retrieved in June 3, 2017 The "yahoo.com" domain was created on January 18, 1995.
The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work. However, Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." This meaning derives from the Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
Expansion Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine. It also made many high-profile acquisitions.
Yahoo!'s initial public offering at the NASDAQ was on April 12, 1996, closing at US$33.00—up 270 percent from the IPO price—after peaking at $43.00 for the day. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.
Yahoo began using Google for search in 2000. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Yahoo formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo had a market capitalization of $22.24 billion. Carol Bartz replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009. In September 2011, she was removed from her position at Yahoo by the company's chairman Roy Bostock, and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.
In early 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, rumors began to spread about looming layoffs. Several key executives, such as Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, left. On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced a cut of 2,000 jobs or about 14 percent of its 14,100 workers. The cut was expected to save around $375 million annually after the layoffs were completed at end of 2012. In an email sent to employees in April 2012, Thompson reiterated his view that customers should come first at Yahoo. He also completely reorganized the company.
On May 13, 2012, Yahoo issued a press release stating that Thompson was no longer with the company, and would immediately be replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group. Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million.
On July 16, 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo, effective the following day.Matt McGee, Search Engine Land. "Confirmed: Marissa Mayer Leaving Google For Yahoo CEO Role." July 16, 2012 . Retrieved March 27, 2017.
On May 19, 2013, the Yahoo board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging site Tumblr. Tumblr's CEO and founder David Karp would remain a large shareholder. The announcement reportedly signified a changing trend in the technology industry, as large corporations like Yahoo, Facebook, and Google acquired start-up Internet companies that generated low amounts of revenue as a way in which to connect with sizeable, fast-growing online communities. The Wall Street Journal stated that the purchase of Tumblr would satisfy Yahoo's need for "a thriving social-networking and communications hub." On May 20, the company announced the acquisition of Tumblr officially. The company also announced plans to open a San Francisco office in July 2013.Yahoo Plans Splashy New San Francisco Digs (and Neon Billboard Dreams) – Kara Swisher – News. AllThingsD (July 26, 2013). Retrieved on August 16, 2013.
On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquired Rockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products were terminated.
Data collated by comScore during July 2013, revealed that more people in the U.S. visited Yahoo websites during the month in comparison to Google; the occasion was the first time that Yahoo outperformed Google since 2011. The data did not count mobile usage, nor Tumblr.
In November 2014, Yahoo! announced that it would acquire the video advertising provider BrightRoll for $640 million.
On November 21, 2014, it was announced that Yahoo had acquired Cooliris.By TechCrunch "."
Decline, security breaches, Verizon purchase By the fourth quarter of 2013, the company's share price had more than doubled since Marissa Mayer took over as president in July 2012; however, the share price peaked at about $35 in November 2013. It did go up to $36.04 in the mid afternoon of December 2, 2015, perhaps on news that the board of directors was meeting to decide on the future of Mayer, whether to sell the struggling internet business, and whether to continue with the spinoff of its stake in China's Alibaba e-commerce site. Not all had gone well during Mayer's tenure, including the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr that had yet to prove beneficial and the forays into original video content that led to a $42 million write-down. Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, told The Washington Post that sometimes, "the single best thing you can do ... is sell the company." The closing price of Yahoo! Inc. on December 7, 2015, was $34.68.
The Wall Street Journals Douglas MacMillan reported on February 2, 2016, that Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer was expected to cut 15% of its workforce.
On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced that it had agreed to purchase Yahoo's core internet business for $4.83 billion. Those assets were merged with AOL to form a new entity known as Oath; Yahoo, AOL, and Huffington Post continued to operate under their own names, under the Oath umbrella. The deal excluded Yahoo's 15% stake in Alibaba Group and 35.5% stake in Yahoo! Japan, which were retained under the name Altaba, with a new executive team.
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts, one of the largest breaches reported to date. The United States have indicted four men, including two employees of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack. On December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account information, including security questions, to at least one billion accounts. The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to "forge" cookies.
In response to these breaches, Bloomberg News reported that Verizon was attempting to re-negotiate the deal to reduce the purchase price by $250 million, causing a 2% increase in Yahoo stock prices. On February 21, 2017, Verizon agreed to lower its purchase price for Yahoo! by $350 million, and share liabilities regarding the investigation into the data breaches.
On June 8, 2017, Yahoo shareholders approved the company's sale of some of its Internet assets to Verizon for $4.48 billion. The deal officially closed on June 13, 2017.
Products and services
Yahoo operated a portal that provides the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gave users access to other Yahoo services like Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Messenger.
Communication Yahoo provided Internet communication services such as Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. As of May 2007, its e-mail service would offer unlimited storage.
Yahoo provided social networking services and user-generated content, including products such as My Web, Yahoo Personals, Yahoo 360°, Delicious, Flickr, and Yahoo Buzz. Yahoo closed Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, and numerous other products on April 21, 2011.
Yahoo Photos was closed on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo announced that it would discontinue Yahoo 360°, including bug repairs; the company explained that in 2008 it would instead establish a "universal profile" similar to the Yahoo Mash experimental system.
Content Yahoo partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo Games to provide news and related content. Yahoo provides a personalization service, My Yahoo, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo features, content feeds and information onto a single page.