Just wondering, how many people use Yahoo? It's supposed to be getting more popular but at least with my peers I don't see that trend. Is it popular outside of the USA?
They were kind of the definitive site for general information in the 90s, so many millions of people who started using the internet in the 90s got used to going there for news, sports, finance, weather, and some of their other verticals, as well as things like email.
A lot of those people haven't had any good reason to switch to anything else, so that's what they use. This tracks with the way people choose offline brands like toothpaste and such -- once people get used to buying a brand, most of them tend to stick with it until they have a clear reason to change.
That's actually why the transition to mobile is so crucial for them -- those people still want to keep up with sports and weather and everything else on their phones, but they're more likely to use an app than a website. If Yahoo loses their userbase in the transition to mobile, those users are probably never coming back.
Yahoo Sports is an excellent site, I go there multiple times a day.
You asked about international: the (mostly independent) Yahoo Japan is huge and always has been; my wife and many of her friends use it as their homepage.
I would never have considered Yahoo in the past, but recently Google has been on a crusade to make their products worthless to me so I've been looking around to see what else is out there. I've settled on Bing maps, though OSM is what I'd like to end up using eventually. I suspect at least a few other people are doing the same, and some of them might be settling on Yahoo products.
I read a while back that they are #1 or #2 in email services. Gmail may have surpassed them, but they're still in the top 3 along with Hotmail. Email is a great tool for customer retention.
Yahoo has a pretty huge portfolio of sites that fit in that bucket compared with googles many(but in honesty generally unpopular outside of search and email) offerings.
I'm guessing it's popular amongst people who install software that in turn installs a yahoo search toolbar on them that they cannot figure out how to turn off/don't bother to.
Apparently Yahoo is the "2nd largest search directory on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%".
- First of all, wow, what a landslide!
- Secondly, Yahoo still has a pretty big slice of that pie relative to everyone else.
- Super surprising that Google owns 85% of the search market, yet is still behind Yahoo on traffic :/
