The Yahoo! Brand Is Still Worth $1.6 Billion To Masayoshi Son (bloomberg.com) 16
The Yahoo brand, once an Internet name as iconic as Google, might be worth little to Gen Z-ers more familiar with TikTok and Instagram. But it still has value in Japan, where the once-illustrious marquee just sold for $1.6 billion. From a report: Z Holdings, a unit of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp, agreed to buy the rights to the Yahoo name in Japan for 178.5 billion yen to replace an existing licensing agreement. The deal follows the sale of Verizon's media division, the bulk of which is the original U.S. version of the Yahoo web portal, to private equity firm Apollo Global for $5 billion. Yahoo! was one of Son's early big investments, who built a $100 million stake in one of the original web startups in the mid-90s. He subsequently formed the joint venture Yahoo! Japan, which over the years morphed into tech and e-commerce platform Z Holdings as Yahoo sold off its core assets.
Money to burn (Score:1)
Yahoo was never actually worth $1.6Bn; it certainly isn't now.
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Re: Money to burn (Score:2)
Yahoo Japan is nothing like the rest of Yahoo. It's an entirely different service that licenses the Yahoo brand, and is still very relevant in Japan.
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Do you Yahoo? (Score:2)
Long as one puts some distance from their US counterpart it could mean something.
Z Holdings (Score:3)
Yahoo! once was the best search engine back in the late 1990's, then it might have been $1.6-Billion Yahoo! seemed more a well-maintained index than actual search engine. Then Google showed up with the Page Rank algorithm, and Yahoo! was still more about the discussion boards, lists, e-mail, and the like.
Then they reached their Peter Principle level of incompetence, lacking innovation or innovating in the wrong things, and hiring incompetent CEO's, and now they're...well interesting Internet trivia. The company's early history is discussed in "The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley" by Po Bronson.
The Internet search engines/companies of the 1990's are parallel of the American auto industry shakeout in the late 1940's and 1950's.
Z Holdings, well I won't belabor the obvious parallel to a television show of the late 1970's and 1980's, and a classic line that was the laughingstock joke for many teenagers. :) But no man is an island unto himself, even in fantasy.
JoshK.
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Yahoo used to be far more than a search engine, they used to have chatrooms, and socializing groups by topic that would be considered the same or similar to social media today and yahoo groups would rival facebook (sortof) this was the late 1990's early 2000's
Yahoo used to be a great source of news. Not the news articles themselves. They where garbage. You could read the article, then you drop down to the comments and find out the real truth. Since the closed the comment section, Yahoo has become useless as a news source.
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Yes. They spent a lot of money branching out because the writing was already on the wall that web directories were dead and they'd never be able to spin up anything as good for actual search as what Google had. If they had wasted that money on search at that point, they probably would be gone already. Google does the same thing today. Alphabet is doing everything from self-driving cars, to smart home devices, to OS development. There's a reason companies use their capital to encompass as many verticals
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Throwing mud at the wall. The core products from the Big Five provide the dirt and water. Amazon's AWS is probably the only bit that's stuck. As long as the core products are good enough to maintain their market share they'll continue making mud. It takes more than deep pockets and hubris to beat these core products, or to develop something new that the Big Five can't copy.
Re: Z Holdings (Score:3)
The problem Yahoo faced was that it's executives operated it as if it were a publishing house, seeing every site and service they owned as akin to an independent publication catering to a specific audience. In the publishing world this does make sense, as you don't usually think of your teen girl magazine's readers as having anything whatsoever to do with your business magazine's readers and the other way around. Hadn't management been blind to the fact Internet sites didn't work like that, as is obvious no
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Yahoo Groups were quite nice, and superior to Facebook groups in every way, really, when it came to supporting an interest group or club or something.
Matter of fact we had a couple of clients who were scrambling to find something similar after yahoo pulled the plug (didn't really find anything as good, Gaggle tried but didn't really cut it).
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Which is why it didn't make any money. People caught up with their bowling league or fan club in 10 minutes and then logged off for the rest of the week. Facebook feeds you a never-ending stream of low quality but addictive information to keep you connected for long periods of time every day.
Re:Z Holdings (Score:4, Informative)
Yahoo! Japan was never a subsidiary of Yahoo, it was Japanese owned and done as a joint venture with licenced branding and the Yahoo search engine from the very start in 1996.
It became really popular because it provided a lot of features for Japan that no-one else was really offering, and because it branched out in broadband and cyber cafes. Yahoo Auctions lives on in Japan and is much more popular than eBay, for example. In 2010 they switched to using Google for search.
Their homepage is like something out of the 90s: https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ [yahoo.co.jp]
Japanese people love that though. The language is suited to high information density and people commit to services because companies keep them going for the long haul. We all know how infamous Google is for killing stuff off, but in Japan you find things like Nintendo supporting the original Famicom/NES until 2007 (24 years after launch) and they only stopped because they ran out of spare parts. People expect Yahoo Japan to people providing the same stuff they did in the 90s and they do.