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Bad News from Yahoo
Several people have submitted stories about the bad news that Yahoo released today (it seems appropriate to link to the story on their site). They appear to be having the same difficulty with ad revenue that is hitting everyone else. It's not a good time to be dependent on revenue from dot-coms that are themselves struggling to stay afloat.
- the number of available locations for banner placements has shrunk and
- the aggregate eyeballs are focused on fewer pages
the few big remaining sites will be more prosperous than ever. Right now there's a whole lot of supply and not so much demand. The demand is growing (albeit more slowly than people imagined) and the supply is about to fall off precipitously.People will not buy subscriptions unless they're for specialty services or bundles.
that cross-time communication should not be relied on for investment advice. It is well known (see the documentary Frequency) that a major Yahoo stockholder received his information in this way.
Did anyone read the forecast? Revenues are below forecasted expectations, but *Yahoo remains profitable*.
If anything, it will mean Yahoo will now trade closer to their captialization value. I mean, they have $2 *billion* in cash reserves. And they have more than just ad revenues - they have a number of revenue streams, albeit that ads are their primary one.
Yahoo will remain profitable for some time to come, I imagine.
What Yahoo!, and some of the other dot com's need to do in order to stay afloat is to diversify. Sure, yahoo has their hands in just about everything internet. but what they don't have is some offline bussiness. I'm sure that if they got involved with OEM's and got them polluted with Yahoo instant messenger. Or got some sort of Yahoo brand crap selling in stores.
Not that i care what happens to Yahoo, it annoys me. (just as long as they don't sell out to AOLTM)
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Checkout Cyberatlas for demographics: www.cyberatlas.com
And other sites on internet.com's marketing channel.
Formula 1 sponsorship. Barrage of TV ads. Insertion in major Hollywood flick (Inspector Gadget). This is WAY too much for a Web portal.
Since the internet is going to be flooded with new ways for big sites to make money, (ie Flash commercials and huge banner ads) does that mean that the free internet is soon to be gone. I would hate to have to dodge revenuers just to goto my favorite sites... Maybe we should get together and create a huge free network where noone cares about making money and everyone is contributing for the betterment of the net itself... /Cough /Gag
rrdejay
Cough Gag So when can I get my MCSE for the XBOX...
Gone but not... ummm
why wouldn't they run that poll? it's demographic research. if they get a low response on d), that instantly increases their value to advertisers.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Hey man, I actually meant to put $.01 in my original comment. I agree; 10 cents is a bit much to pay per page view! You bring up a valid point though.
I have to correct you here - the first dot-com hype company was Netscape, not Yahoo. Netscape started the whole Internet dot-com thing, before it was even called "dot-com". I was working at a small, doomed-to-failure Internet software company down the street from Netscape on the day Netscape went public and their shares quadrupled or so within hours. The air around the office was, "wow - we didn't expect that!" Nobody really expected it and it started the insane internet stock frenzy that occurred over the next few years.
...
The end of the dot-com insanity was LNUX - VA Linux. Their stock opened at something like $184 and plummeted within a day or two. It didn't take long before it was at 10% of its opening value.
These are very convenient, symmetrical bookends for bracketing the "internet bubble". We have Netscape's soaring first few days and VA Linux's plummeting first few.
In the end, a bunch of idiots got richer, and a bunch more idiots got poorer. The final result will be a negative impact on the economy as a whole resulting from the money that was burned on useless crap during the internet hype days.
So, as usual, it is the average joe who will bear the burden of this foolishness.
I will be happy to see Yahoo, Amazon, and all of the other favorites of the internet hype days fall by the wayside. Hopefully everyone will have learned a lesson, and we won't have to go through something like this again.
Of course, the snake oil salesman will always be waiting in the wings for another opportunity to feast on stupidity and greed
What's stopping you from starting your own web site 'reminicent of the old days'? I don't think that anyone has stopped other from doing what they want, so don't cry about what people are doing if it doesn't have to affect you. This isn't Microsoft trying to break standards and enforce proprietary protocols, if you don't like what a site is doing, don't go there. If you want something different, but it isn't there, you can bitch about it, or take it as an oppurtunity. You might say 'I don't have the time', but its all a matter of priorities. You can't whine about what others are or aren't doing if they aren't affecting what you or others are capable of.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Oh, come on, $2 billion is a lot of money! You're saying you can't make a measley $232 million when you have $2 billion in the bank? Your goal is just to break even?
Here's how you can stay profitable, Yahoo.
A) Discontinue all Internet operations. Turn off all routers, servers, etc. Fire everyone except your CFO. Get rid of all office space. Sell all furniture. Expenses should now be $0.
B) Send your CFO to Bank of America. For your convenience, I've even included a map that shows how to get from Yahoo corporate headquarters to the nearest branch. (Important: This is a link to Yahoo! Maps, so print this map before you do Step A.)
C) Tell the CFO to open a Prima Savings Account. $10,000 minimum balance, but that should be no problem. Deposit your $2 billion. (Note, you will also get free checking and free ATM card.)
D) Wait one year. You will be earning over 5% APR with your Prima Savings Account, just like I do. Pray that Greenspan starts raising interest rates again.
E) Celebrate! You've now made $100 million! Maybe not the $232 million that we wanted, but it's a lot better than breaking even, right?
Just a suggestion.
Yahoo is at present probably faced by take over threats and is therefore getting as much of it's act toghether as is possible, which is not much though.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Signal 11 and Anne Marie
(Score:-1, Redundant)
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Does anyone else find it funny that Yahoo's CEO's family name is Koogle? It's just too good. You know?
Please!! Don't encourage them or even let the idea fall in their head. Have you seen a 256 color animated ad? It just takes years to download.
I am just happy at the mere chance of never seeing or hearing those annoying Yahoo comercials with that damn yoddling...ACH!
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Actually that raging search thing is Alta Vista, not Yahoo.
Personally, I no longer start a newbie out by telling them to start with Yahoo if they want to find stuff on the web. Google is my choice these days (not a lot of censorship plus they still link the whole web). As an aside, I met the announcement that Google was picked by Yahoo to provide their search system with some amount of trepidation. I would say that so far my fears were unfounded.
Don't worry, I once had my IQ tested...the results were negative.
I'm willing to bet Slashdot has a smaller number of employees than Yahoo. Yahoo's expenses are probably much greater. This is why all portals are going to start having trouble. The Internet is all about specialization in technology. Yahoo has tried to do too much.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Whether you like to admit it or not, advertising is a science (to a certain extent). There are things that work (psychology of color) and things that seem good but are wrong (grabbing attention with the blink tag). Banner ads are becoming much more aggressive, with the flashing and the fake error messages and the java applets and the monkey punching. If I see a banner ad that tries to get in my face and force me to look at it, I block that adserver (and their revenue). If I see a calm, nice-looking banner ad that actually informs me about the product, I leave it alone; hell I might even read or click it.
Yahoo and all the other struggling companies should try setting some standards for banners they will run. The banner industry is killing itself by failing to see that they are pushing the consumers away.
Yahoo's problem isn't that their ad banners aren't enough to pay the bills, it's that their service isn't worth paying for. Yahoo (the indexing service) is a really simplistic, yet largely ineffectual service. I can't remember the last time I used Yahoo, but I used google's search at least 5 times a day.
There is no 'Value Add' to what Yahoo provides. This doesn't count the companies that Yahoo bought. They have purchased a lot of companies in the past, integrated their offerings, yet Yahoo the index is still not worth paying for.
They need to switch from a 'attract eyeballs' revenue model to actually offering services people would pay for, and not services that are derivative parasites of the index (pay to rank).
The truth is that I made a Yahoo in an hour of programming PHP, but people can freely add categories themselves and add content to the categories. There is even a 'rank this item' community rating system that averages the individual votes.
In closing, I'm surprised that Yahoo has even lasted this long.
careful, you're going to piss-off Kuro5hin's readership. All 5 of them.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I have a special user setup to download a My Yahoo page to my Palm III using AvantGo. It kicks ass. I love Yahoo. For all the reasons you state and more. I love the huge broad variety of things available, and I love the fact that I can configure my page and get rid of most of the garbage.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
nanopayment.
Picopayment.
Peter Piper Paid a pico PayPal Payment.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You can't waste money on the kind of scale it was wasted in the Internet Mania without terrible repercussions. Companies have taken on vast debt to finance expansion and have overbuilt massively on every front. Economists who seem to have a clue call this 'malinvestment'.
One spends money, as a business, in the expectation of generating more money in return. Wasted money means time lost while the business generates more revenue to re-invest in something else. Taking on debt for unproductive investments is much worse -- instead of just hoping for a payoff, now the business MUST generate the money that they expected their investment to create, and must also pay interest on the money to boot. Debt-driven expansion that does not pay off is VERY bad.
The huge amount of malinvestment during the Internet Mania will have repercussions for many years. Post-bubble fallout is always horrible, and this has been far and away the biggest bubble in human history by any measure. It makes the 1920s bull market and crash look minuscule by comparison. Businesses in every market, not just tech, have been cannibalizing their long-term prospects to drive up the stock price short term. This made the executives of these companies very wealthy via stock options, but it has done terrible hidden economic damage. Lucent, AT&T, Cendant, Xerox, and IBM are all good examples. (IBM just hasn't been found out yet by the mainstream.) There will be lots more of this going forward.
The 1920s stock market mania (they were overbought in manufacturing and automobiles) was catastrophic enough to lead into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Crash of 1929 did not cause the Depression. In school I always had the image of a bunch of people who were eating caviar October 15 and homeless bums in the street on October 30. In actual fact, the decline took several years, steadily destroying wealth as it went.
The reason this wealth destruction was so catastropic was because people had taken on too much debt to buy stocks with. When the mania unwound they were left with huge debt and no possible way to pay it. The destruction of all that paper wealth and subsequent defaults caused a massive deflation. It took ten years for the economy to recover. And mark this: their whole economic expansion and stock market craze was driven by debt, just as ours has been.
The fallout was so bad it scared off an entire generation from credit. True full-blown manias are so awful, in fact, that historically they have only happened when almost all the people old enough to remember the last one are dead. It is no coincidence that few of the people who were adult in 1930 aren't around to warn us.
Worse still: we haven't even crashed all the way yet! The Nasdaq will drop by at least another 50%, and the Dow and S&P need to drop by 40% or so to bring themselves in line with historic valuations. The Nasdaq bubble popping alone might not be enough to trigger a full-scale crisis, but the Dow and S&P are teetering on the edge of the precipice even as I type. They might avoid this crisis. But eventually they will either decline, or the Fed will inflate the money supply so much that everything else will rise by the same amount. The overall outcome is inevitable, but whether we get there via inflation or deflation is up to a combination of investor sentiment and the Fed. So far, the Fed looks to be choosing inflation, as they are printing money at absolutely unprecedented rates. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I believe they grew the money supply at something like a 15% annualized rate last quarter. Money normally should grow about as fast as the economy does. 15% growth/year in the money supply is corrosion of wealth, a cancer -- most people don't know about the tumor yet but if left unchecked it will be lethal.
So, how about all the poor Nerds that are making money by selling overpriced services to those ignorant commerce people?
I guess most of the people here who criticize the commercial aspects of the net don't recall how it all happened.
Remember, the banner ad is an American invention. The first online commerce was product sourcing and then automating logistics, etc.
Well, most new technologies are first invented from the most profitable online sector - p0rn. Cause they can afford to pay for it.
So, as long as p0rn is around, new technologies will be introduced - and picked up from the comercial sector.
But, without online sales sites the Internet is not doing much for global understanding.
Sad as that might sound, the spread of the net in Asia is focused on commerce. Education is secondary, if it does not serve commerce and information exchange is always based on commercial interests.
Nowadays so many sectors of the economy depend on a smoothly running Net, that it would be unthinkable to seperate commerce [and that means those annoying ads that pay our bills] from the rest.
So, maybe it's time for a reality check? Aprt from that, ask yourself, would you volunteer free time, if you had the choice of getting a cent from every banner displayed online???
I may sound like a broken record...But alas, I go back to the same old song --- "No Product, No Success" --- I have seen many a neighbor, family member, or work mate bask in the green shadow of being "in" on the almighty Yahoo stock dollar --- all along I was saying --- "No Product, No Success" --- In the end the greedy have gained and then will lose a fortune they never laid their eyes upon --- and the ones who cash in will find another productless beast to bestow their funds upon. I for one am quite happy with google (and the only type of add I deam appropriate -- the freindly text based hyperlink -- not those god awful flashy
And my last rant -- I am sick of hearing about the poor dot coms and content providers drowning in a see of bandwidth bills and no revenue....I pay my bandwidth bill every month with the income from my day job thank you....And if you are getting enough visitors to make the T3's choke -- yet you can't find a way to make money....I would suggest maybe you start selling tshirts, caps and pencils or something rather than trying to make money from banner ads from another company with no product trying to make money from banner ads in cahoots with even a bigger company....That all equals the worlds least successful triangle scheme from where I am standing.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Yeah: http://63.197.152.21/imaging/
It's got pr0n that people added, so be aware.
I didn't know that anyone used CP/M anymore....
While i'd agree with most of the point you make, there is one little thing that you should consider:
All that useless junk as you put it, that was bought and money wasted on during the upswing days is exactly what kep the upswing running, the economy booming and most people happy.
Without the kiddo-CEOs spending all that cash on non-core business items, the boom would have fizzed out in a matter of months.
The point is that it's sad the see that the Internet has been dumbed down so much by advertisers, dot-bombs, and people selling pet food on a web site, that one of the sites that was there from the beginning, helping everyone find there way around, is now a victim of all those investors who think the the only thing the net is good for is to make a buck.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
The primary focus of life is survival. Next come creature comforts. Both cost money.
Will you please apply for ajob at our company? I mea, you can create content 16 hours per day, 7 days per week and we will publish all your content rather than paying you a salary.
Please bring along all like-minded friends you have. We will provide free food and board...
Oops, this'll be modded down as [-5 Truthful]
Interesting article... too bad the guy left out costs like development costs, paying for the content creation for the site, support, etc... All he looks at are bandwidth costs versus ad revenues.
Actually, my comment on Kuro5hin covered your point already. Read the frickin discussion!
Other than bandwith costs, costs don't grow linearly with the number of subscribers/viewers. I don't have to produce twice as much content if my audience doubles in size, and support costs probably won't double either - they'll increase, but unless the site's code doesn't scale, they shouldn't double. etc....
Of course, income shrinks linearly as you decrease the number of users - probably faster, if you read rusty's comments at Kuroshin. This where lots of dotcoms get screwed. They try and target a small market - but their personnel costs are on-par with a website with a much bigger audience.
Slashdot and Kuro5hin probably have the best business model possible, since they have little or no content creation costs - they expect CNet and ZDNet to provide it (Slashdot) or they expect the users to provide it (Kuro5hin).
e) Hemos
I think that would be more appropriate, seeing as Hemos basically ran Slashdot's advertising before it was bought by Andover.net.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Don't forget the payment you have to make just to post to this site!
Okay you might only have to pay to see the headlines but the comments about the story is what makes slashdot different and better than any other news service. If everyone had to pay $.1 or even $.01 to post, would you? It would sure cut down on the trolls (which might be worth it just for that) but we may miss some insightful posts as well.
My favorite bad idea is www.swiftboard.com. They give out free keyboards with an extra row of buttons labelled "shopping" "games" "clothes" etc. The idea is that they get everyone to install their keyboards and a Windows driver, and whenever people want to buy something they will just hit the "shopping" key.
They keyboard has a regular PS2 connector, and it works great with Linux. It's slightly on the lightweight side, but as far as keyboards go, it doesn't have a bad typing feel.
Thanks, www.swiftboard.com! So sorry about the sucky business plan!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Last is the possibility of internet "commercials". These would merely be much more immersive banner ads, similar to what is shown on TV now. Before accesing the site, the browser would first have to view a 30 second flash movie from a sponsor, for example.
The only problem with this sort of thing is that the majority of Internet users are *still* not hooked up to a broadband service - 30 second flash animations/commercials take a LONG time to download on a 56k modem - especially if they're of a significant size....
If I were on a modem, and a site decided to make me watch a 30 second flash advert before accessing the site, I'd be seriously considering finding an alternative site which offered the same sort of information/services....
It wouldn't surprise me if this were the case across the board, not just within mail: they've gotten so big, there is no individual accountability/culpability/contact within customer service... and therefore a lot of people/companies who they could be selling services to have become nothing but an eroded market.
So yes, banner ad revenues are part of the story -- but they may not be the WHOLE story.
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
That's an interesting point. I wonder at what point content providers would refuse to run ads. What size is just too big?
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Interesting article... too bad the guy left out costs like development costs, paying for the content creation for the site, support, etc... All he looks at are bandwidth costs versus ad revenues.
.coms are having problems becuse they can't afford bandwidth, they can, they just can't afford bandwidth and employees.
I don't think all these
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Reading the Kuro5hin (what does 'Kuro5hin' mean, anyway?) article, it sounds to me like he has mathematically described the concept of demographics. It appears that other media have figured out how ad rates change based on demographics.
For example, a daily newspaper or a prime-time network televsion show is 'fat' whereas most magazines and cable shows are 'thin'.
Related to the Yahoo! announcement, it sounds like Yahoo needs to be thin but has purchased so much content that it is actually fat.
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
I think that the problem with being nickel-and-dimed is when you're not paying attention, and it starts getting out of control. Before you realize what you're doing, you've got $2000 of charges for Asking Jeeves about his evil twin. True, people didn't like paying for AOL access by the minute, as evidenced by AOL's HUGE jump in popularity when they switched over to flat rates - even though they were totally blindsided by service levels. But I don't think that asking someone to subscribe to websites at macropayment levels will work either. A lot of websurfing is based on aimlessly wandering from site to site, and that depends on a very low bar to entry.
If they did THREE things, I think it would be workable.
1) provide a VERY COMPACT UI readout of the account status on the desktop, so I can see where my account stands, and know when I'm being charged, and how much and for exactly what. This has to take up almost NO screen real-estate, and be very configurable, and lightweight, and responsive, and secure, guarantee privacy, and absolutely bulletproof stable, AND FUCKING CROSS PLATFORM!! (I don't mean NT and Win95 either!)
2) Implement this status monitor as an open standard, so I don't have to run one for Yahoo, another for Slashdot, another for SpankMeMama.com, etc. Make it open. I don't exactly believe in DeJure standards, but I think that's the only way we can ensure it gets done in a way that nobody can embrace and extend it.
3) Give people LOTS of free trials. The last thing you want to do is charge everyone $5 to get into a site for the first time, just to see what it has, and then provide them crap. If this happens, consumers will become VERY gunshy, and will avoid trying new sites.
If this can't be done, then Micropayments will not work, and since banner ads obviously don't work, then the internet, as we know it today, will collapse under it's own weight, and what we'll end up with is a more peer-to-peer oriented system without any commercial support (gee, wasn't that what the internet was all about in the first place?).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Ok now THAT's interesting considering the fact that I got to keep MY email address. Yahoo gave me the choice of either using :
myemailaddy@geocities.com or myemailaddy.geo@yahoo.com . It seems that you:
A) Didn't read the instructions when you changed services
or
B) They made a mistake when they deleted you.
I vote for A.
Smilee
__________________
I've heard the argument that it is kept private to keep trolls from submitting stupid stories just to well, "mark their territory" on slashdot, but that can be remedied by having the people who review the article have a choice: accept, reject, or delete. We'd only see rejected articles on the "rejected stories" page, deleted articles would go into the abyss.
(still posting without the +1 Bonus because it's somewhat off-topic, but important anyway)
-bugg
No cheating now. You can't use any success story from history. its gotta be new though it can be a new way of doing an old thing.
If you people would just do as you're told, everything would be OK.
Now in buying they did what some consider to be a "good" thing: in acquiring a number of otherwise failing .coms (egroups being the biggest example).
Now we have problem two -- yahoo's own potential for failure (nothing they did distinguished themselves from any other "dot-com") takes out all those other acquisitions with it. If yahoo reaches a point of shutdown, egroups and many others go with it. THIS would greatly affect the public's perception of the internet. People have gotten used to certain services, and the loss of services that were regularly used is something that may end up devestating the 'net in the public eye (much less wall street); just look at how great the magnitude of complaints was when deja went.
So now we have our delimna -- how do these services (not the shopping stuff, but the stuff the 'net was made for -- communication and information exchange, via mailing lists) survive when there is no decent business model to pay for it? These things are too big to be run by "volunteers" anymore.
One successful model is O'Reilly's. Yes, their new "oreillynet.com" pages are advertising based, but for the most part the advertising is for products they know their audience wants -- O'Reilly's books. Their advertising is mostly internal, directing their "web" readers to become "paper" readers. The o'reillynet stuff becomes a donation, strictly for brand recognition.
IBM's developerworks and alphaworks function the same way -- show people IBM's coding quality and they'll come to IBM for commercial work as well. Sun wanted the same impact from Java, but early on, with "javasoft", they distanced the Java work a bit too much (for some; not enough for others).
Therefore, Yahoo's only ultimate form of survival is to get someone else to buy them out, and have the site supported by advertising that's mostly oriented to the buyer. This means the buyer can not, in themselves, be an advertising-based site. It has to be something "real", from the old-economy.
Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be utterly full of shit... ;-)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
yeah, food over mail, that doesn't work. I understand the nostalgia value, but I guess my point is that all is not lost. It might be a challenge to find good sites, but nothing is restricting the same small community, high quality, stuff from being there. Actually if you think about, all the commercial shit that is going down in flames will probably help this. The internet will turn into a powerful angle of buisness but not a substitute for quality and evolution.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Sorry, bad link (I couldn't tell that it was session-based). Here's the right one:
http://www.nasdaqnews.com/about/rules/4120.html
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This is true. Notice, however, that I said these were future possiblities for the internet. It's almost a given that as more and more households get broadband, industries will attempt to make money out of the development in any way possible. Now, it is not feasible to have a 30sec flash intro on top of each commercial site. But, as the buzzwords of "streaming content" and "realtime multimedia internet" actually become viable for the everyday user, companies will no doubt have no hesitations about incorporating bigger, badder, and much more bandwidth intensive advertising into their sites.
If I try to view a site with a flash commercial, I either:
I might watch it if it's really well done, but that's for entertainment value. After all, on those rare occations I watch TV, the advertisments are abosultely hilarious.
Bottom line: Not profitable.
No sig here.
Yahoo's problem is they've diversified WAY beyond their core business. They want to be AOL, in a way. More diversification costs them more and more money, with the payback reaching beyond 2020. Assuming there isn't a disruptive technology that they can't deal with, they'll probably make it.
I'm also dead set against the lame clik-thru mentality of the current thinking in internet advertising. Trying to get someone to stop what they're doing and do something else because of an obnoxious ad is stupid.
Banner ads should be thought of like highway billboards. Advertisers should be concerned with mindshare and identity instead of attempting to direct people's wills.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
How fast one ages in these Internet years.
Oh yeah, well, I was on the net back when it was beating slaves to run papyrus tablets from Ur to Jericho.
Ya think they bothered with banner ads back then? Spam? Flame wars? Fuck no! Papyrus was expensive! besides, you could keep labor costs down by watering down the food supply, or mixing it with dirt. The old joke back then was that bandwidth was dirt cheap! HA HA i crack myself up. Plus, there wasn't all this crazy copyright infringement and intellectual property law crap. Everything belonged to the king. If some author didn't like his scroll copied, the king would gently remind him (not her) who owned the writing. Or the king would just have some lions do it.
Things were great until God decided to bundle the browser with the OS. Then nobody had any choice but to use their eyes for browsing. Try reading cunieform with IE. They say IE is standards compliant? BULL SHIT I say.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Hey! That's my sig! You can't have it! Hmmm. Maybe I should put it in a 600x600 pixel banner ad and copyright it. If I ROT-26 encrypt it beforehand, I can even put it under the DMCA.
> Thank you for visiting Swiftboard.com. We are currently accepting no new orders.
.
Well, shoot. Now what am I going to hook up to my CueCat . .
The analysis on kuro5hin is incredibly naive and completely misses the point. For any large or even medium scale website, the cost of bandwidth and hardware is only a small/insignificant fraction of the total operating cost.
The cost of staffing,content generation,and marketing dominate. Take a look at Yahoo's quarterly report:
http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/4q00income_p.html
Yahoo spends about 1/3 of its revenue on sales and marketing (and you can assume that they don't do so because they're stupid). Now where is the cost of bandwidth in there? Any analysis that focuses on bandwidth cost completely misses the point, and is suitable only for tiny hobbyist run websites.
Oh look, someone else is trying to make their ad look like a Windows dialog box. It was cool the first time, now I just ignore them.
speaking as someone in broadband tech support, i really hate these.
"yeah, yahoo told me that my internet connection is not optimized. what the hell am i paying you people for if you're not giving me the best possible service?!"
--saint----
I've read through most of this topic, and I see a bunch of people who think money is evil and that capitalism is bad. Free is good. Leeching is good. Gratitude is bad.
Wake up people. Maintaining a web business costs money. It costs money to purchase routers, servers, bandwidth, programmers, accountants, managers, rent space, etc...
Why should anyone do this for you just so you can get it all for free? That is totally un-American. You think ads are evil? You think money-hungry corporations lead to a decline in innovation, information, and technology? Now THAT's the biggest pile of bs I've heard in a while.
Why is the U.S.A so powerful? We invented the airplane, pretty much pioneered the internet, lead in the world of biology, chemistry, genetics, medicine, transportation, etc... You name it, we made it big.
Would all this be possible if money-hungry corporations weren't allowed to exist? Who do you think funds research and development? You work hard and come up with something ingenious, and you will profit immensely from it. That's the capitalist spirit.
Think of communist countries around the world. What have they ever invented? Nothing! And why is that? Everything belongs to everybody. No one has incentive to create, innovate, nor invent. I mean, why invent something just so you get nothing out of it other than a pat on the back? That's human nature. Nobody will work hard if there's nothing in it for them.
So now, nobody wants to click on banners. They use filters and proxies to make ads disappear, all the while they're stealing bandwidth from yahoo, reading their articles, utilizing their services, depleting their bandwidth, etc... You want it all for free, and you don't want to give back anything. You're selfish and all you care about is yourself and nobody else. You justify it by saying these companies are greedy and evil.
So now internet business is dying, dying to a point where 90% of the online companies are going under. Free hosting is dead. Free email is dying. Free and creative content is diminishing. Jobs are being lost. Companies are shutting down. Happy now?! Was it all worth the ad filtering?
And in the end, the very people who hate money, think corporations are all evil, who hate ads with a vengeance and never ever clicks on them... They're the ones getting hurt most, because the very internet they love so much is dying. This only affect them and nobody else.
So you love the net before money-grubbing corporations got into it heh? Well why don't you just crawl back into your time hole of 1992 and look at useless sites like coffee pot cams (useless in terms of today's world of course) and nasty-looking personal sites? Yeah go back to the stone ages and enjoy your damn caves. That's what you deserve.
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
Infoseek? I'd totally forgotten about them. Weren't they eventually acquired by the Go network? Well, no matter, I quickly stopped visiting once the decline in quality became evident.
As for search engines, not that anybody cares, but... these days I like to use 1) Google, 2) Northern Light (a lot of people don't know about this one but it tied for top honors with Google in PC Magazine's test of search engines), and 3) Altavista for it's incredible flexibility. Although, at one time, I did use Yahoo, it's transition into a portal kind of turned me off. Not to mention the little period where their search engine just generally sucked. And, although they do use Google now, it just seems like Google does a better job at being Google than Yahoo does. Go figure.
On a related note, did anybody else ever use Magellan?
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
--
I think people are relizing that when you click on a ads it just gets you to more ads. When is the last time you hovered over a ad and it sayed "http://www.yahoo.com" not 3 lines of cgi script.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
A spokesman for Yahoo denied that publicising the failure to meet estimates was a deliberate ploy to attract users. Contacting the slashdot editors was inconclusive, with their only comment being "All your base are belong to us".
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
The economy was not booming. It was a "false" boom, at the expense of what we are now experiencing - a correction.
The only way an economy can grow is to produce useful things, to build useful services. It is true that alot of the Internet companies which were invested in were doing useful things, but then again, many were not, and ALL were vastly overfunded. The result is that lots of money and value looks like it is being produced on paper, but in the end, we get the expected "correction" (i.e. the entire last year's stock market, and probably more to come) and we see that all of that paper gain was really nothing.
This is a waste of resources, a complete and utter waste. For two years or more we had lots of people employed doing basically worthless stuff. That is NOT good for the economy and it does not produce sustainable growth.
On my more cynical days I theorize that the strings of the entire economy are pulled by some very smart people who know how to make money when it is booming and when it is busting, so they alternate boom and bust cycles and get richer and richer while everyone else gets poorer.
But when I am more clear-headed I typically chalk it up to the greed and stupidity of the common man.
Or Falafel's on San Carlos a couple blocks east of 880.
---
No, I'm not trying to be clever, I just don't know any better.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
"News pending" halts are common -- companies are required to tell NASDAQ before they release any substantial news, and NASDAQ determines whether it merits a trading halt. So maybe you could say Yahoo! suspended trading indirectly, but NASDAQ was the one who actually halted trading.
The NASDAQ "requesting further information" and halting trading, however, is usually an indication of a substantial irregularity, either in the market or with a company.
Or heaven forbid, have you paid for their paid search engine submission packages?
Wouldn't it be nice if somebody just collected links to all the "Add URL" pages for the engines in one place so you could quickly do manual submissions? If you just had links to click on, and you had a text window open that you could copy and paste your info from (URL, description, email), then you could do manual submission much quicker than using one of these applications.
And you won't run into the barriers the search engines put up against URL submission bots.
Here you go:
-
Search Engine Submission Form Index
Leave your tip in the jar.Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
---
You don't pay much attention, do you? Yahoo's searching is powered by Google. Does Google kick its own ass then?
Yahoo is one ugly ass website nowadays
On the contrary, Yahoo is the only site that sticks valiantly by its principles and delivers excellent content in pages that are fast and easy to use. You can actually use Yahoo on a modem, with an older browser. I love that.
Yahoo can't offer much that newer websites can
Name one website that offers the breadth and quality of services that Yahoo has. MSN? Nope. AOL? Nope. Not every single piece of the Yahoo site is the absolute best of its kind, but as a whole it is an amazingly useful piece site. I wish there were more like it.
Because these companies hire on big blowhard executives who want to surround themselves with sycophant junior executives and those sycophant junior execs all want to justify their jobs so they spend all their time coming up with as many bullshit ideas as they can pull out of their butt and the CEO wants to go public and make millions of dollars so he starts blowing out all kinds of bullshit to the banks and investors about how bloating their site out with all kinds of useless crap will somehow equate to a larger consumer audience and thus infinite amounts of revenue and then they go public and the stakes are raised even higher now that you have a bunch of whiney stockholders to please etc etc..
Haven't ever worked in corporate America?
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
I should have mentioned, I live in Australia - where the availability of high quality, affordable broadband internet connection is rather low. My views are at least partly "clouded" by the environment I live in (I actually have high speed Internet access through the Optus@Home cable Internet service, considered the best in Australia at the moment, but it's not available to the vast majority of people).
Daamn!
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
In the early days of the Internet, people thought that content would be value, and would bring in customers, which could be sold to advertisers. That failed miserably: see Slate, for example. In the slightly-later-but-still-early days of the Internet, people thought that sites that aggregated a lot of data would bring in customers... which could be sold to advertisers.
Neither of these business models seem to work well in the long run. If the value of what you have keeps plummeting, it's hard to grow enough new stuff to keep your value.
Yahoo mostly serves as an Internet directory: a set of links to other sites. (Yes, I'm aware of their webmail, groups, chatrooms, auctions, job listings, and many other items.) In other words, it has mounds and mounds of data, and a well-thought-out way to index that data.
However, that data is not necessarily information. And information, collated and digested, is what people need.
I would put far more faith in the financial stability of something like QuestionExchange than in Yahoo -- if that QuestionExchange were more broad. Something that, given a question, will retrieve information -- not data. Those kinds of services will always remain pay services because they cannot be automated: they require human intervention.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
I am researching what happened to the .coms. Clearly, advertisers are no longer funding Internet companies with their banner ad budgets. Apparently most advertiser changed their minds simultaneously. This hints at a single or small number of market research firm providing "advertising effectiveness statistics" to the many advertisers. Can anyone tell me if there is one such firm or small group of firms? If so, did they publish an official report citing poor return on advertising dollars? If so, does anyone have links?
Thanks
Why can't companys stick with an idea or two and make it better?
To a certian extent, Yahoo! is. Waaaay back in the day, Yahoo! was just a search engine, nothing more.
A few years ago, they turned into a portal and haven't changed much since then. Since a portal is an end all, be all place to do everything Yahoo! had to offer many many services and purchase other companies in order to be the best portal there is.
There's nothing wrong with Yahoo! per se, however being a big player in the Portal market takes a lot of money.
The bottom line is banner revenues can be sufficient for profit potential if you play your cards right.
Think about how much money Yahoo must burn on its day to day operations, versus the amount of times people will actually visit the site. I don't think 10% of its visitors will follow a link, and considering most of Yahoo is based on its once highly visited search engines, lets face it, google kicks its ass on searching, Yahoo is one ugly ass website nowadays, Yahoo can't offer much that newer websites can, and those newer websites' operational costs are bound to be a fraction of that of Yahoo's
Popular sites like slashdot have a high enough CPM to stay more than just afloat. I'm surprised Yahoo hasn't been able to say the same
Your forgetting one key principle, most revenue is generated on click throughs, which most people ignore. If I'm coming to
360 degrees of Karma
I was about to post to this, then I read your post. So, instead of being completey redundant, I thought I'd just say thanks.
I wonder just how many have gone through the same evolution of browsing - Yahoo to AltaVista to Google. I also wonder what will be next in the evolution, or will Google find a way to evolve that is more effective than their predecessors?
With the rapidly ever-changing beast that the web is, and I'm sure always will be, is there anything out there that will really last, anything that will really have a true "tradition"? I suppose sunsite turned metalab turned ibiblio (is this current or have they changed again? ;) ) might be the closest thing I can think of, but as they are tied to academia, that might be one reason they are not as prone to the changes of economics.
Or, I might be full of it.
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
Click here for story, as told by Salon
This Sucks.
Not only for Yahoo, but for me, this pretty much drives a nail into the coffin about how I have felt about the internet as a whole for about 18 mos now. I long for those glory days when Yahoo gave relevant information, banner ads had not even been 'discovered' yet, and the internet was a really useful tool, full of intellectual information.
Then the entrepreneurs came.
And all was lost to The Almighty Buck. Information and usefulness was secondary to how much money your clicks meant to somebody who had no right to earn money off you. I suppose the best thing to do is just to be patient, and wait for the time when all the Sanford Wallace's of the world start to figure out that the internet is much like a library, full of information, and not to be exploited.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
What it says is that some rare websites that provide almost nothing yet inexplicably get tons of hits can be profitable. You can't just decide you'll be run such a site, you need either genius or luck, and probably a bit of both now.
Incidentally, it says these things using made-up numbers and ignoring the most important issues such as attracting good quality hits and the cost of actually producing content.
Basically, the article says nothing more than that advertising sometimes pays more you spend than hosting and bandwidth, sometimes not. It's hardly a rousing defense of banner ad based business models.
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The one wearing dalmation coat who is running DisneyWorld is salivating at the prospect of acquiring Yahoo for next to nothing.
If Yahoo keeps having financial difficulties, it would be out of anyone's wild guess that one day we wake up to find www.yahoo.com becomes www.goofy.com.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The basic fact is, Yahoo is badly run. I've posted previous rants about their software's shortcomings. I had assumed that they were profitable anyway, but I appear to be mistaken. The report that they're in trouble completes a familiar picture.
Yahoo was the first big Dot Com, and thus the first target of overenthusiastic Dot Com get-rich-quick hysteria. Now, if anything is bad for a company, it's having a lot of over-eager investors throw money at it. The company has to grow quickly, regardless of the negative effects, in order to justify all that investment. Plus, management has no incentive to control costs. So you get growth-by-acquisition, overlapping projects that don't complement each other, initiatives that are ramped up before they are fully debugged, etc., etc.
If I were a Yahoo investor, I'd be terribly concerned. But as a Yahoo user, I'm actually kind of encouraged. Yahoo is too well-established to follow Infoseek into Portal Oblivion, and this kind of reality check will make for a better operation.
__________________
I invite you to further the decline of such companies by visiting Guidescope. Some may remember the Junkbusters, who used to put out an adfiltering proxy called, cryptically, "Internet Junkbuster". Since then they've moved that operation to this new company. Ad blocking is much improved because all proxies now turn to a centrally maintained database of ad's instead of using simple RegExs. I've had great results with Windows & Linux using it. Also they are very good about privacy. Check it out.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Hehe .. a "me-too" post, how sad. Anyway, I also kept my e-mail address at geocities. Can't remember having any problems. There was a problem when they tried to change their TOS to that draconian "we own your stuff" one, but enough people bitched about it and up and left geocities (I was busy packing myself) that they changed the TOS back to more friendly terms. Thats the only problem I remember having. I must say though I get an absurd amount of junk email on my geocities address. Although I haven't been very careful with it in the past (newsgroup and webbots :( ), so I can't rightly blame Yahoo for that.
So I'll have to vote for A as well.
I tHiNk yoU bEtter get a NeW 1nE.
They're boring as hell, with lots of turquoise panels, and look like they were designed by the same guy who did the Juniper Networks buildings down the street -- which also sit on former Lockheed-Martin land. But they sit next to Lockheed-Martin buildings which were all constructed with overhead money from government contracts, so they look real good by comparison.
I think this is all a ploy by our management, which must be cleverer than it looks, to get some nice new buildings for free, or even with a small profit. Sell the cute little .com the land, let them put their buildings up on it, and then buy it back at a discount when they go under due to the inherent flaws in their business plan. I give them another 3 years at most.
And the brethren went away edified.
A web advertising primer for suits:
:D
1. The web is an interactive medium.
2. People on the internet don't like to interact with advertising because they don't have to deal with it, unlike television or the radio.
3. Expecting people to click on advertising because they can, in a medium which lets you not have to deal with advertising, obviously indicates that a lot of people think that just because computers have screens that they're JUST LIKE television.
4. Television commericals are not clicked on so why should web advertisements be? Just because an ad is on the TV it doesn't mean that someone is watching it.
5. All that potential advertising revenue and all those advertisers too suspicious of if anyone is actually seeing their lameass shit. Tsk tsk tsk.
6. We KNOW about your product. We KNOW about your very expensive and delicate brand. We decide in two seconds whether we want or need it or not, regardless of how many times you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again. And guess what? The more you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again the LESS WE WANT IT. Your marketing does NOT WORK on the Internet. Hello? Have you read The Cluetrain Manifesto yet?
7. The sites that get more aggressive with advertising are the sites which will drive their audiences away.
8. We don't like you. We don't need you and we don't have to put up with you. Do you get it yet? The Internet is not TV. If you'd rather waste your money and turn the Internet back into a haven for academics and geeks, then be our guest.
Idiots.
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
If you think that AV or Google is a replacement for Yahoo, you're mostly wrong. Yahoo displays stuff in categories, which makes it easy to find sites about a particular topic. Search engines are designed to locate a particular piece of information. This is an important distinction.
I used to use Yahoo and Lycos (when it was king of the search engines), and then Yahoo and AV, and then Yahoo and HotBot, and then Lycos and Google. Now I pretty much just use Google and Google Directory. Sorting information is different from finding it. This is particularly useful for thinking, "I wonder which big sites there are about video games." You can get a nice sorted list, broken down by authority as well as the different platforms or genres. If you type in "video game websites" into Google, you get a few good hits, but mostly a laundry list.
Of course, two months later they were acquired by VA Linux and PenguinComputing's ad-rates have shrunk quite a bit since then... ;-)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Amazon will survive. They have a way of making actual money: profit off book sales. And they don't have to cut their margins to the bone: they aren't the cheapest book site on the Web by any means, but they use convenience to keep their customers.
Yes, I know the one-click patent is evil. I'm not discussing what should be here, but what I think will be.
--
Xenu loves you!
What sense is found in hosting a poll which may ultimately scare away future revenue sources?
Sorry, I didn't see this comment when I replied. Anyway, ETYS isn't suspended quite yet, just halted. It'll probably be halted until it's delisted. That seems to be the usual course of action.
I agree that stock traders don't look at .com's customers and features, but Yahoo does have good features. Their email program is much better than the other free-mail sites like hotmail. Their Companion toolbar allows me to keep bookmarks on a server so I have them wherever I am. The briefcase is an easy way to get some quick ftp space. And there is some advantage to a portal, no matter who is providing it. I think these are valuable services, but some of their other projects lack some sense of general usefulness, although maybe newbies get more out of it.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
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I've had Yahoo! mail since the day it went live and never had this kind of problem...
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OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
I just got a better idea, if i owned a dot com with a questionable future, i would sell out to yahoo or AOLTM or some idiot with more money than brains, and then i would go retire.
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
I doubt slashdot would run this poll, but how about:
/. ads.
Slashdot Banner Advertising:
a) I have clicked on
b) I have research a product/company after viewing/clicking on an ad.
c) I have bought something from the advertising company because of (one way or another) the ad.
d) JunkBuster!
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
But realistically, US$.1 (ten cents if you're stupid) is too much for a micropayment. Sure, /. may make $100,000 dollars in a day (1 million pageviews), but I don't want to pay $6 of that every day!
If 10 cent micropayments became the standard, people would stop using the internet because it'd be to frickin expensive...
I would love to see net evolve (de-evolve?) to a state at which it is not only not the next big thing, but largely ignored by the general public and the media. Maybe, just maybe, we'll see the primary focus return from money to content.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
As Peter Drucker, once said, the key to growing any organisation is to understand what it's real business is (not just its job). For example, if you think about it carefully, you'd realise that McDonalds is in the property business (as a means to controlling its burger sub-francises). Similarly as others have noted in previous /. posts, Microsoft is not in the OS space but in IP licensing (beg (share options for microserf-lifestyle), borrow (embrace,extent,extinguish) or bully (buyouts)).
... why is TV considered a medium?
So, if you study Yahoo, what is its business? It was originally a directory (useful when the web was growing rapidly) and people wanted directions or a map of possible destinations. However, by adopting the advertising model, it confused its business with that of home shopping. When people are searching for an item, they subconsiously ignore all information not relevant to the direct needs (one reason why google seems to prosper is due to its simpler interface). However, by adopting an advertiser driven revenue model, Yahoo has the incentive of not-so-subtlely distracting your attention and thus increasing your search costs (time take to discover something of relevance). If people want to browse for ideas, they buy home&gardens magazines or gawk at the lifestyles of rich and famous where ads do have a role in branding in the proto-wish list stage. If they are on the hunt for specific information/bargins, then the home-shopping mentality is not relevant.
So, the advertising revenue model depends on the fact that impressions lead to a sale but if the disconnect between reality and perception (ie near zero correlation between 2 events) is high, then business (who do have to fork out for ad space) will just find that a $ of advertising will go better in another medium than through Yahoo.
One wonders whether other "successful" internet startups have fundamentally flawed business models as well and what financial stress will reveal who's swimming naked when the financial-hype receeds.
LL
ObJoke
Because it's neither rare nor well-done.
...and no debt.
Given that the economy is slowing down and all the dot coms are going belly up, yahoo may still be the best kind of stock to hold because of it's strong balance sheet and diverse nature and upwards potential as a e company with experience.
Remember, 2 billion is a LOT of money and the rest of the market isn't doing great either.
My boss told me that he heard from someone else (oh yeah, reliable...) that when Yahoo! went public, they put ALL their money into bonds. That was how they were able to stay profitable... Does that make any sense to the capitalist sheep reading this? It was explained to me that the return will be low, but it'll be a positive return nonetheless. Guess it either wasn't true or it didn't work out as planned?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I like them as a portal, though..
Especially for fantasy sports leagues. They really keep on top of those, and they are a lot of fun.
I rarely search for anything on Yahoo now, though. I go straight to google.
-- Thrakkerzog
I hope this is true, speaking as a programmer working for a non dot.com start up. Unfortunatly, all the money invested in Donkeyhumper.com means VCs are poorer (having lost a lot of cash), and wary about new startup investments. Rather than simply admit that Donkeyhumper.com was a bad idea, many seem to lump all startups together as having been "too risky".
In our case, we are in the process of securing additional funding, and the VCs are wanting considerably more stock for their investment. As we will be needing that money to pay bills really soon, I suspect we are screwed.
*G*
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
Kuro5hin has an interesting piece on the economics of ad revenues. The bottom line is banner revenues can be sufficient for profit potential if you play your cards right. Popular sites like slashdot have a high enough CPM to stay more than just afloat. I'm surprised Yahoo hasn't been able to say the same.
All these web sites start off with a simple idea, and just keep adding more features, and buying other companys. I'm sure yahoo's bandwidth and other costs are just impossible to imagine.
Why can't companys stick with an idea or two and make it better?
'Normal' conglomerates in the 80's had to shed their bloated masses to stay afloat; it seems a natural extension that the bloated monsters of the e-conomy would have to do the same sooner or later.
Curious? .coms spun off child companies? It seems a pretty 'assimilation focused' economy.
Have any
It seems to me that the industry as a whole is moving away from the largely ineffectual revenue collection system of banner ads. I foresee the advent of subscription based pay services, micropayments, and perhaps even internet "commercials"
/., that could add up to 3000$ a day.
Subscription based pay services are obvious. Check out strategy.com They provide subscription based services to a number of online businesses, which are then used by the end users of each business.
Micropayments are relatively simple as well; using a standardized system such as paypal, each website could charge a fee, such as $.1 per page view. For a site like
Last is the possibility of internet "commercials". These would merely be much more immersive banner ads, similar to what is shown on TV now. Before accesing the site, the browser would first have to view a 30 second flash movie from a sponsor, for example.
These are only some of the many future revenue possibilities...
Well, they might not be doing too bad. The last keyboard I bought was $5 -- and it's only marginally less comfortable then the $60 Alps Wave I'm typing on right now.
If you figure that the retail markup is 30-50%, this is fairly cheap advertising.
Too bad they aren't taking any more orders for this keyboard!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Wrong. You would definitely *NOT* charge people that post MORE money, you would, in fact, give people who post *credit* and a DISCOUNT for posting.
;) )
Why wouldn't you? They contribute, they are essentially working for you and paying YOUR bills.
I would subscribe to Slashdot for $4.95/month, or $12.95/year -- if they paid me for:
Posting a story they use (A fair amount. $50? $100? $500? $1000?)
Posting a story they DON'T use (these are my thoughts and ideas)
Posting a comment, paid based on the score it receives (will this comment make me rich? Doubtful.
Buying a product through their advertisers -- YES, they can still advertise. I don't care, I don't look at them anyway. When I do, it's because I enjoy it. Big deal.
I want Slashdot to be successful, and for everyone truly involved to make a living off of it. Why? Because if they don't, it may one day fail, and we definitely do not want that.
What would *THIS* post be worth? $1? $5?
It would be interesting. I would also like to see 'top scores' for people who post good content; if I click on their name, I see an index of their best posts. I also get to see a banner ad if they have one, and a link to their home page. Why not? They earned it.
Jason
feroxtech.com
Perhaps they should make their banners bigger..
Just a though.
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/11/2153202.shtm l
You mean that article? From three months ago?
...that there is a fixed amount of money that can be used for advertising, and you can't spread that over an infinite number of inane web sites. One company that actually produces and sells a product can't very well support 100 web sites that make all of their revenue from advertising.
I mean, Yahoo is a more useful site than most, but I certainly don't use it to do my shopping. This whole "recession" thing is just caused by people understanding that the "millions of revenue from advertising" business model is fundamentally flawed (at least if too many people use it).
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I got one of the first personal 56 kb frane relay sites back in 95. I ran a small hosting site that put some small organizations on the net for the first time. Banner ads were unheard of then.
Our html was simple. No flashing animation to soak bandwidth and irritate the reader. You could understand what a web site was trying to say with only using lynx. Try that now. I did. Often you get gibberish. Too bad. Lynx and simple web sites would be great for the palm tops and wireless devies.
I never did need the so called clubs and chat rooms. We had the ultimate forum. Usenet. In fact, I still use usenet today. I am a little sad that it has been pushed to the back of the shelf behind the glitzy Yahoo's; Deja's; and other .com's. It was also free of spam and
needless flame junk.
Perhaps may we witness the re-birth of Usenet?
If the likeness of Yahoo, AOL, Deja, Excite, and the other biggies were to go away; I think things will get very interesting.
Cleara
"There is no 'Value Add' to what Yahoo provides ... Yahoo the index is still not worth paying for".
Second part first: you're not paying for it, so what's your point? At the current price of "free", millions of people think it is worth its price each day.
First part second: look beyond "Yahoo the index", and there's plenty of value added. If they didn't give it away, I'd pay a yearly subscription fee for their easy-to-use, fast, comprehensive finance tools. BTW, if you can spend an hour programming up anything like that, post the link to it tomorrow morning and I'll promptly eat my cat.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Obviously not you. In the future, please do not read my posts.
I would have reserved an extra-long boring comment for you, but sadly you did not provide me with enough information to write about.
In the future please provide Your Real Name, Your E-Mail Address, Your Home Phone Number, Your Credit Card Number, and a one-hundred word essay about Why I'm Such An Asshole On Slashdot.
Thank you.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
After the crash of 1987, the excehanges were forced by the SEC to automatically block trading of a volatile stock. The exchange itself has to shut down if it's keynote index (the Dow, the Nasdaq...) falls more than a certain amount. The purpose of this was because computers do a fair amount of trading (as in actually making decisions), and they can really start beating stocks down without merit. It's kind of like the karma cap, I guess...
Perhaps they should try the Remora banner. =)
2001-03-03 04:28:20 Class action lawsuit against VA Linux (articles,va) (rejected)
So when there is bad news about Yahoo, it gets published, but not when it's about VA?
This almost causes me to question journalistic integrity.
(Have No Score +1 Bonus checked because people will scream off-topic, but the issue needs to be addressed somewhere)
-bugg
Yahoo paid 4 billion dollars to buy the hoe addresses of all the geocities members and their real email addresses. Well over 10,000 dollars per fake name. When Microsoft bough Hotmail for over a billion They paid 10,000 dollars for my fake home address too. When Network solutions was bought for 20 billion dollars last year to get access to the contact list of everyone and their street addresses they also paid 15,000 dollars per address but at least they were 98% correct (mine was fake, so I ripped of Verisign by 15,000 too).
One of theose fake contact email names was only known to Yahoo when they bought this database and now my hotmail address known only to yahoo-geocities gets 20 spams a day. They then told me in threatening letters repeatedly that I had to accept a new service pollicy to continue my free POP mail at Geocities.com and worse... change my NAME!!! Thats right! they wanted me to use xxx@yahoo.com even though a HTTP email user already had been using xxx@yahoo.com YEARS AFTER I was on the web on geocities as a geocities pioneer. I would have to change the front and back of my email address, and they threatened to stop forwarding geocities mail even though it takes no effort for them. I was outraged and figured out tricks to continue successfully receiving AND SENDING my POP mail using geocities mail for about two more years. It was my precious identity and official business email (anonymous). I even used it for Internic contacts for domains to prevent hackers from stealing my entire server to be able to change domain admin rights. But finally... sometime in august they fucking killed it all. AFTER over SIX YEARS of steady daily usage! Yahoo has no phone numbers, except sales, and driving to the silicon valley would be no good, because I would probably be so angry I would beat a Yahoo admin to death with my fists. This is an outrage. YAHOO KILLED GEOCITIES. They did it with 4 billion cash. Was it worth it? I shorted yahoo 10 times in my life, making money a few times and then losing my ass by over 100K other times. I hate yahoo more than any person on this planet, except maybe ex employees and their competitors. They never had technology. They Used Altavista and others for their engines, they thwarted the DMOZ, they are unresponsive, thier stock quoates and all other services are contracted out, They have nothing. Their stock is FINALLY hitting 95% less market cap, the same as nearly 90% of all other dot coms. I hope they crash and burn.
They ruined my life and took away my POP email. I want yahoo to get to $5.
No, the small will eat the big. Hobbyists and people who do it "for da love" will eat the lunch of any corp that has to pay people to provide what everyone else has.
Imagine the "MIRACLE" of Linux. I'm an atheist but if I had to believe in miracles Linux would be one of them. An extremely complex OS and other open-source proggies competitive with what MSFT pays hundreds of millions to develop. Guess what? It's yours for free. Every line, every detail. Keep control of the system and you will prevail. A noble OS embiggens the smallest 'puter.
Further, I can work on my own sites and projects for free but no company can seriously expect productive work at the same price.
Also, just because there are some big players out there (Yahoo, AOL, E-Bay, Amazon) is no reason to give up the "promise" of the internet revolution. Those big companies are simply growing faster and converting the uninitiated. It's like Compuserve or Prodigy circa 10 years ago.
Face it, you weren't "popular" or "commercial" hanging out in BBs before the WWW. Don't expect to be that now if you want to be on the edge. Do it for fun. Work on the edge. Fuck the big companies - they are no more relevant than they were before MSN opened shop. They follow, you lead. Mmmm'kay?
Excellent. We Are Nerds. :)
:)
:)
I'm guessing that, as much as I love them, Google will eventually sell out too, once all the original people are gone, and the corporate schmucks have paid them off for the name. The same thing happened with Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla, and AOL is responsible for being the Corporate Schmuck in a few cases so far.
I have no idea why SunSite keeps changing their name; however, the ftp site remains essentially the same, and I can still go to 'sunsite.unc.edu', port 21, so I don't care what *they* call it.
But I'm very thankful for that, because they're the closest and biggest linux archive around. (it's at UNC, I'm at NCSU... thank us for UUCP and USENET, too.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This is how the market will work for a while. It will take a very long time for a purely internet company to actually be successful, at least in the way of profit. For time being the successful companies online will be those that have a real physical presence, as in real stores, etc. It will take a long time for the economy to move to an electronic medium successfully. Plus one has to look at the amount of people that not only have access online, but that have access where they can shop. That will be further down the road. I have no doubt that it will come, but one must be patient. The Industrial Revolution in the United States did not happen overnight. The Electronic revolution has to play by similar rules. It will just take time.
What good is a used up world, and how could it be worth having? --Sting
Maybe http://www.raging.com is for you.
It's the AltaVista search engine *without* the portal.
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
The Internet is such a great thing, but one thing many seem to overlook is that it is not a neccessity. For years people have lived without the net, and while it does make live easier, it is just like a car, cell phone, etc., a novelty.
Mid to Late 90's Venture Capital firms went ballistic funding companies that were gone faster than they had came. Recent days VC is dried up as people are realizing their is no immediate ghastly halt of life for anyone without the Internet.
Keeping afloat is a hard thing to do when you have bills to pay and revenues from ads just wont cut it. Its not like television where a broadcaster can sell the rights to programs that are in syndication and make revenue off of reruns. Banner ads are not all they once claimed or hoped to be and many companies were under the impression it would last forever. Companies whose revenues fell under this scheme suffered and are suffering most, since there's much more competition meaning ads are flooded and are likely to be meaningless.
Yahoo has outlasted many dot.coms and the decision to step down as CEO was IMHO a wise move. Think about it, where else is Yahoo going to get revenue from, selling webspace, email accounts, stock quotes? There isn't much out there on the net right now, and until the next best thing comes along many other sites without a surefire business model will all end up on FuckedCompany
Free Porn (oh by the way its ad free too)
360 degrees of Karma
If Yahoo is feeling the banner pinch, how is slashdot.org dealing with this reality? Has the banner dynamic changed here yet?
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~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
But as a portal, they ROCK. I'm sorry, I don't know what I'd do without my.yahoo.com. It's a nice place for a public box to keep spam from my email. Mine has customized sports, free fantasy leagues, tv schedule, alubumn releases, saved news clippers, movie listings, yellow pages, directions, contacts/address book/calendar (regulrarly sychronized with my outlook at home and work with a free plugin), snow reports for ski areas I go to, weather for my area... whatever. I LOVE IT. Even there shopping portal is pretty good. I don't even get any spam from them.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
If this means that some crappy sites don't survive, too bad!
sulli
RTFJ.
Actually, no. Way back in the day, Yahoo! was a web directory. They offered a modified grep to search their directory, not the contents of the pages in their directory.
They added search functionality in a partnership, first with Open Text (my beloved OTI...sigh...), then with Alta Vista, now with Google. [ There may have been others in the mix...I got away from search engines for a while...sigh...;-) ]
Diversity is a great for many things, but as a business plan, it usually stinks. Both Yahoo and Amazon would've been further ahead to partner with someone else to provide those services instead of providing them themselves.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
The purpose of a trading halt is to accommodate news releases. The halt gives everybody who's interested in buying or selling YHOO time to find out about the news and factor it in their plans. This halt, like most halts, lasted a couple of hours.
The news can be bad (company announces it's not going to make as much money as it thought) or good (company announces that some other company has offered to buy all the shares at a 50% premium). In practice, trading halts on news are more bad news than good news.
After everybody's had a reasonable chance to look at the news (say, two hours), the exchange re-opens trading in the stock, and people can buy and sell it at whatever prices they agree on.
In this case, YHOO was trading at 21 before the halt, and it's trading about $18.70 now (in the after-hours market). No big deal.
You might be thinking of a trading suspension, where the exchange says: we think this company is so fucked up that we aren't going to let consenting adults use our services to buy and sell its stock any more (for example, ETYS). That's quite a bit different.
two words:
goat sex
Imagine the irony of goatse.cx being more profitable than Yahoo!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Consider: 98% of all the .com businesses were either terminally bad ideas (delivering pet food) or way overfunded. Since there is only a finite amount of venture capital out there, the fact that donkeyhumper.com was getting 10 million in funding meant that some other business was not. Hopefully, this downturn and the death of most .com businesses will mean that VCs will start investing money in relistic (as opposed to trendy) businesses.
This goes hand-in-hand with the need for the VCs to be a little more careful with their money -- even deserving tech startups have spent the last few years flushing money down the toilet in a way that would make any other industry blush; do we really need on-site wine tastings?
Anyhow, this downturn will hopefully bring the tech boom a bit closer to earth and, in doing so, ensure that the economic good times stay with us a bit longer.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Profit is possible, but I guess (quite similar to the O'Reilly story from earlier today) that a company (Yahoo, in this case) can only add so many more features, employees, etc. until their costs greatly outweigh the maximum amount of funds they can realistically receive from showing banner ads. The clickthrough rate on ads has, I'm sure, been determined by now, and companies who wish to have their ads shown know exactly how many times they'll actually be clicked, that is, exactly how many times their message (about a new product, website, or the like) will be heard. Yahoo *should* be making money, but because they care too much about giving users an excellent Web experience, their outrageous spending to give the people everything they want (for free, mind you) is bitting them in the butt. It's ashame that such a great portal and innovating website can't get the message across to users that they do need a little monetary support every once in awhile.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I remember Yahoo fondly from the early days of the web. Back then, it had a well-structured directory of links that was maintained by hand. It was a quality site, and had links the vast majority of useful sites for a given area. It was a lot easier to go to Yahoo to find something than it was to click your way down whatever path you were used to, going through maybe six sites instead of one.
;) But that seems to be the way the world works, and all we can do is cultivate the young upstarts to bring us the technology of tomorrow, so we can enjoy today again.
However, times have changed. Now Yahoo is yet another Cheesy Portal Site, and you'll notice that the article is entirely about their stock price, their public perception, their CEO, blah, blah, blah... And nothing about their customers, their technology, and the useful service they provide.
That's because they don't provide a useful service anymore. Instead, they're partners with people who do provide a useful service. After the web started getting too large for Yahoo to handle, AltaVista became popular. It was a showcase for DEC's Alpha computers, showing how powerful they were by how they efficiently searched and indexed millions of web pages, and found your queries. The best part about altavista.digital.com, though, was the query structure, for instance being able to say "+host:slashdot" and search for posts...
So, for a while, when Yahoo needed a real search engine, they used AltaVista's, I believe. I'm not sure because by then I had switched over to AltaVista anyhow. But that too eventually turned into a cheesy portal site, although it looks better recently. However, now Yahoo uses Google for their searching, as well as having their own tree of links that people submit.
Google, however, actually *does* have innovative technology, and hasn't sold out quite yet. They also use the Open Directory project as the basis for their web directory, and have a high quality tree of links reminiscent of how Yahoo used to. But the really useful features are their "PageRank" technology, which takes links into account when indexing, and their Cache, which often is the only way to find things that have been taken off the web.
So, sadly, new useful web sites will often give into the money, and their quality will go downhill. (not mentioning any names here
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Now that I'm adjusted to this way of surfing, what happens if all the big websites start going down because they can't afford to pay the bills? What the hell am I going to do at work all day?
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