I am sure all of you must have noticed the Yahoo! ads on the television lately. You must have seen the over the top, hip advertisements that are trying to tell the consumer that the word ‘Yahoo’ is just an extension of ‘You’. I admit I was a little curious as other than Yahoo Meme, there was nothing new with Yahoo. Atleast nothing that is setting the blog world on fire. So I decided to dig deeper into what was all the buzz about Yahoo going on a re-branding itself. It has ear-marked $100 million for this media blitz.
Yahoo! becomes Y!ou
- Yahoo started the media blitz with a lot of new changes with their homepage. Some of the changes are just cosmetic but other features are pretty good.
- One of them is adding new tabs on My Yahoo! page. This way I can access update to my Facebook account along with previews of emails withing Gmail too. You can follow blogs with Yahoo reader.
- Search with Yahoo is now much better than it was before. There is nothing very different about the way its search engine works but it seems to have some tweaks and features which makes it a lot more organised. I doubt this will really challenge Google Search but it might make loyal fans of Yahoo search even more loyal.
Yahoo has made some changes and lately I also came across an article that mentioned Yahoo is registering a lot of growth in the last quarter. On the surface that looks like great news but I frankly feel that it is fighting for its survival. It has now closed down its Geocities business which was bought by Yahoo for a massive $3.5 Billion in 1999. Recently they are looking to sell of Small Business, Zimbra, Delicious, Games and Jobs.
That is a good sign, but selling of these services or closing them down over the year will mean Yahoo might just survive. They plan to keep their focus on Search, Chatting, Mobile services, Email and their homepage. But the worrying part for Yahoo is that even in these key areas of focus they are not exactly dominant. This worrying trend will continue until Yahoo discovers or implements something really path breaking.
6 Comments
These days, we see a lot of advertisements on TV of yahoo saying “its you”…. but i doubt if that will help yahoo to capitalize. Because almost everyone is obsessed with facebook, google etc. etc. so they wont consider trying anything else.
very much true nickson ! but wen we are lookgin @ a bigger picture , yahoo still got its base. facebook if we consider i feel tey have come up witha very good strategy of integratign application that keeps people hooked to it. atleast i am one amoung them lol . 😉 u knw wat am talkuign abt , farmville , etc. ahh.. well gota go time to harvest .lolz..
good to know info . Mr kane
@Nick: That seems to be the case, I can not see it getting people to move from facebook and google to Yahoo with just fancy advertisements and layouts. They need something radically different to work for them.
@Muja: Thanks. I am not sure if Facebook is still a big threat to Yahoo. But it will soon roll out voice support. That might seriously challenge Yahoo chat services.
Yahoo and Facebook are two totally different things….
It’s like comparing and an apple with and orange but who cares after all both are fruits 😉
i dont care its worth or not
but i like that advertisement..
when will i get chance to see google , facebook , twitter advertisement in indin channels.
There are not many Google Ads, except test ones. Most of their revenues come through text ads on Search results and 3rd party sites (adsense). Maybe when they are looking to aggressively push something new there may be ads. But the Yahoo advert is really awesome.