Anyone that looks back to the early dial-up days of the Web through rose tinted glasses of nostalgia will tell you geeky war stories about the browser battle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. They were probably blogging on Angelfire, frequenting the online communities of GeoCities while performing their online searches using AltaVista before the internet was even a thing.
Yahoo! is one of the few companies to survive the transition, but the end of an era is in sight as the deal with Verizon moves a step closer. The core business will now move over to Verizon and whatever is left will operate as an investment company under the rather uncatchy name of Altaba. Predictably, chief executive Marissa Mayer looks set to walk away from her troubled role at the former search giant.
The long fall from grace is a modern fairy-tale about the importance of adapting to the continuously evolving digital landscape. Yahoo’s public offering was the largest for a tech startup way back in 1996. The early concept of an internet web portal that provided users with everything they needed such as movies, news, sport, finance or searches was enough to secure homepage status for many new web users.
The directory for the early internet quickly ran into trouble when Google entered the scene in 1998. According to comScore the Yahoo portal still receives over 204 million regular visitors in the United States who refuse to let go of the past. But the former giant struggled to appear relevant in the eyes of a generation obsessed with Instagram and Snapchat rather than Yahoo Answers.
A bold move to attract younger audiences by acquiring the online blogging platform Tumblr for $1 billion back in 2013 wasn’t enough to save the fallen behemoth. Yahoo continued to try and push the boundaries when it became the first online service to stream an NFL American football match, getting 15 million viewers. But the golden touch was long gone and Yahoo posted a loss of $4.4 billion for 2015,
Although it’s still unclear exactly what will happen to old fan favorites such as Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and Tumblr, most of the services are already confined to our internet history. Ultimately, the long stumbling giant paid a hefty price for failing to adapt to the high-speed broadband internet that quickly filled people’s homes and mobile internet.
Failing to react to the combination of Google steering users away from directories of hyperlinks by indexing the Internet and the rise of social media all helped Yahoo fade into irrelevance. Recent breaches have also helped damage the reputation beyond repair, but the harsh reality is that the Yahoo brand is no longer relevant to audiences in 2017.
Verizon’s AOL revealed their plans for the future at the CES show in Las Vegas last week. A new “BrandBuilder suite,” for advertisers will enable them to transparently and securely find and convert new customers to their brands by creating ads across display, video, and mobile devices.
If you’re a customer of ours and you want mobile consumers, which everybody wants, we are uniquely positioned with Verizon to bring AOL ad systems and Verizon data together to do really differentiated business in the advertising world – Tim Armstrong, AOL
Outside of brand awareness and direct response programs, the program will also include a new format that provides data incentives to Verizon Wireless customers. But, will the carrier’s customers agree to engage with ads in exchange for a more generous mobile data allowance? I cannot think that this tradeoff will be of little interest to the modern digital audiences that go out of their way to avoid ads rather than sign up for more of them.
AOL publishers such as TechCrunch, Engadget, and the HuffPost are all aiming to simplify how brands or advertisers serve ad experiences. But, I cannot help but think that they are still trying to keep business models of the past alive, and this is the same mistake made by Yahoo.
In this brave new digital world, our attention is scattered across different platforms. If target audiences are no longer watching live TV, skip online ads and increasingly use voice search rather than a keyboard, why cling to keeping the old model alive?
The clean narrative of nostalgia makes us feel safe because we know exactly how things turned out. However, maybe it’s time to learn from the mistakes of the past rather than repeat them. The reason that Yahoo is no longer relevant in the eyes of digital natives is because they failed to adapt to major consumer trends. When desperately trying to restore former glories, they made a few bad high-risk bets along the way too.
If this sounds like a familiar story, it’s because we have seen how it plays out many times with the likes of Blockbuster, Nokia, and Kodak. We will never return to the days of buying a magazine only for an AOL CD to fall out, and that’s no bad thing. Maybe it’s time to closely monitor current trends to prepare businesses for the future rather than adding new solutions to old business models.
