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Bad News from Yahoo

Posted by michael on from the ya-who? dept.

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.

31 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Why ads suck by theancient1 · · Score: 5
    Most people don't like ads, so they get ingored. Why don't people like ads?
    • 90% of them look like they were slapped together in 2 minutes. A cheap-looking ad does not inspire confidence in the quality of the site behind the link. Every ad I remember clicking on looked like it was made by a professional graphic artist. Yes, computers are capable of displaying more than 16 colours.
    • No originality. 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.
    • Animated garbage to catch our attention. Whether they be dancing credit cards, animation in a fake windows dialog box, or just a flashing background -- almost all animation is there just to get my attention. Well, it works -- I say, "my god that's annoying", and scroll down the page without a second thought.
    • Misleading messages. Click the fast-moving object and win a prize! Okay, maybe this belongs under item 2, "no originality"
    • Unclear messages. A surprising number of ads don't give enough of an idea what you'll get by clicking. In the beginning, this was a marketing tactic -- "hmm, I wonder what this means... maybe I'll check it out." I admit, I did it myself. Now, it's so common, it's not worth our time to look at every obscure ad.
    • Dislike of interruption. Unlike traditional media, the internet is interactive. While surfing, I have a "plan", if you will. I know where I want to go next -- and it's not to that advertiser's web site. The ad has to be more interesting than the other content on the same page. It doesn't help that most ads cause the page I'm currently reading to disappear.
    • Lack of other interesting ads. If 98% of the ads aren't worth my attention, my eyes will be trained to automatically ignore the ad.
    • Untargeted ads. A corollary to the above, most of the ads I have zero interest in even if I did notice them. Online casinos, credit cards, some shareware program -- I'm not interested in any of these things.
    • Perception that ads are annoying. Corollary 2: popup windows, animated visual pollution, and the rest of the above -- all contributing to the notion that ads are a scurge that should be ignored.
    1. Re:Why ads suck by Fervent · · Score: 3
      You forgot my favorite one: the words "Click for More". I remember my second internship, my first with an internet company, and how the CEO of our 3-person startup said the words "Click for more" are psychologically proven to get more click-throughs. "People don't know where to click". Right.

      But look at most mass media sites. The majority of banners will say something akin to "Click for More" or "Click Here". Obviously it works if every other site is doing it, right?

      I remember the pinacle of annoyance for me was seeing *every* Berst Alert NewsAnchor article at CNet being peppered with "Click for More"s. Up and down the page. Like we didn't notice he was trying to get more site traffic. I was so relieved when other people took over the column a month or two ago.

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      - I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.

  2. Re:The economics of banner revenues by NetCurl · · Score: 4

    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...

  3. not just anyone can make a banner ad by Have+Blue · · Score: 5

    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.

  4. outlook is actually pretty horrible.... by Malor · · Score: 4

    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.

    1. Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible.... by Trepalium · · Score: 3
      I'd say that's a rather alamist take on the situation. It's unlikely that the chaos of the 1930s depression will be repeated if for no other reason that there were a number of other factors that severely contributed to it, including the massive droughts. Banking insitutions have changed drastically since then, and measures were put into place long ago to make sure that it doesn't happen like that again. Improved agricultural methods have increased the likelyhood that even in a drought that food can be harvested because of hardier crops, less damaging pesticides and the various automated farming implements. Regardless of what you think of engineered crops, pesticides, etc, few can argue that they haven't improved the efficiency of agriculture.

      Personally, I think (or perhaps "hope" is a better word) this entire tech stock crash is more or less an evening out of the stocks to the level they should be at. Tech stocks have traditionally been far overvalued, even before the internet and dot-com madness. A market that was volitile by nature was being treated as if it was a sure thing.

      Since I'm a Canadian, it doesn't really matter what I think of your politicians, my country's economy gets affected either way.

      --
      I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
  5. Re:Good long-term for Tech Industry by PD · · Score: 5

    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.
  6. Re:An industry-wide shift... by Manaz · · Score: 3

    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....

  7. Re:The economics of banner revenues by Rombuu · · Score: 4

    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.

    I don't think all these .coms are having problems becuse they can't afford bandwidth, they can, they just can't afford bandwidth and employees.

    --

    DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
  8. Re:Good long-term for Tech Industry by acroyear · · Score: 3
    The trouble is two-fold -- one: yahoo needed to be the one-stop anywhere page (x.yahoo.com where x element-of everything) in order to hold enough "eyes" to even come close to making an internet profit. This incorporated building or buying whatever they needed (becoming the portal monolith that they are, out-lasting all others). In this, they succeeded; I consider yahoo the best of the horizontal portals, with (usually) the best integration model in terms of having access to personalized factors in the "my" portal section.

    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
  9. Is this SARCASM? by AtariDatacenter · · Score: 4

    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.

  10. That's not what it says. by TheDullBlade · · Score: 4

    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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  11. It's not just about banner ads by fm6 · · Score: 5
    Yahoo is being hurt by the decline in the banner ad marketplace. But that's not the whole story.

    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.

    __________________

  12. Lend a hand by drix · · Score: 3

    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.

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    I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
  13. Slashdot Ads - How about a poll? by n3bulous · · Score: 5

    I doubt slashdot would run this poll, but how about:

    Slashdot Banner Advertising:

    a) I have clicked on /. ads.
    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
  14. Re:An industry-wide shift... by zaius · · Score: 3
    Actually, for sites like slashdot, that could add up to tens of thousands of dollars a day.

    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...

  15. yahoo has $2billion in cash by gadwale · · Score: 3

    ...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.

  16. Re:Not so fast by agentZ · · Score: 3

    Yahoo's search engine (for web pages) is powered by Google...

  17. The economics of banner revenues by alewando · · Score: 5

    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.

    1. Re:The economics of banner revenues by TrinSF · · Score: 5

      Actually, no. The article on K5 is still overestimating the revenue from targetted banner ads, because he's basing his estimates on published rates currently available.

      Unfortunately, those rates don't mean anything in the current advertising climate. I used to work for dot-com with a revenue stream based almost entirely on advertising revenue with targeted banner ads. (I say used to because they had to lay off half their staff in January, because of the CPM rate crash.)$20 CPMs were possible a year ago, and $6-10 CPM's maybe 6 months ago -- but right now, CPM rates are so low, that even for targeted banner ads in higher-than-average click-through settings, they're still barely breaking $1.00 CPM. 60 *cents* isn't unheard of.

      So, redo the math, reducing ad revenue by a power of 10, (because of his inflated CPM rates of $4-10) and you get more in the ballpark. Further, advertisers are trying to push towards an entirely per-click payment model, which can be quite abyssmal, revenue-wise -- and doesn't take into account all we know about the value of brand recognition over time, etc.

      All you have to do is graph the decrease over the course of a year, from $20.00 CPMs to 60 cent ones, and you'll see why Yahoo's in trouble.

  18. An industry-wide shift... by Daemosthenes · · Score: 3

    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"

    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 $.1 per page view. For a site like /., that could add up to 3000$ a day.

    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...

  19. I've got a solution: by Sarin · · Score: 5

    Perhaps they should make their banners bigger..
    Just a though.

  20. They destroyed my email account! Yahoo = Evil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    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.

  21. Re:demographics 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    Kuro5hin, or K5 is l33t-speak for corrosion, or rust. The explanation behind this is that Rusty, one of the site admins, caught tetanus when Inoshiro, one of the other site admins, violently fucked him with a rusty metal dildo.

    Hope this helps!

  22. Re:bonds by GigsVT · · Score: 3
    All public companies have public accounting records, that detail what they are doing with their money.

    You don't think that we are expected to buy a stock without knowing where the money is and what they are doing with it, do you?

    Go look up their balance sheet on fool.com, it will have all the deatils of their money situation.
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    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  23. Story from a third party by electricmonk · · Score: 4
    The Register has a story on it over here. Apparently, Yahoo! suspended its shares today. A rather drastic move.

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    Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
    1. Re:Story from a third party by jockm · · Score: 3

      Yahoo did not suspend trading of shares, NASDAQ did. The exchange has the right to do this if trading gets too volitile...

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      What do you know I wrote a novel
  24. Re:Hold on a second.. by bugg · · Score: 3
    No, I don't. I'm talking about a Wolf Haldenstein lawsuit, that article talks about a Milberg Weiss lawsuit.

    Yes, VA has more than one class action lawsuit pending, but we don't hear about most of them here.

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    -bugg
  25. Good long-term for Tech Industry by Skyshadow · · Score: 5
    The death of all these .coms is actually a good thing, long term, for the tech industry.

    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.
  26. Profit Is Possible... by ekrout · · Score: 3

    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.

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    If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
  27. Yahoo by pb · · Score: 5

    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.

    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 ;) 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.
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