I may be the only person on HN who is bullish on Marissa Mayer's strategy.
Basically purchase aspiring start-ups that hit some troubled time scaling (Polyvore seemed to be running into some monetization issues). By putting the digital properties into Yahoo's network, the acquired company get lots of free traffic + better monetization (Yahoo already has a great brand sales department + the data Yahoo might have on people could make more engaging ad programmes).
I think this is a bit flawed: it assumes the products were great but simply lacked a distribution strategy. In many cases, it's more likely the products were just ok and still lacked a distribution strategy - causing a sale.
My bet is Marissa is trying to build more driven, savvy, smarter leadership by buying it and promising influence.
They've finally launched a mobile app. Looks nice, if it gains traction, then the new Yahoo! has arrived.
Yahoo! is copying Facebook, not 100% but in the way of humility. Mayer's Yahoo is finally pivoting to mobile and to social because that's the 'new homepage'. Look at all the social media addicts, hoping for likes and comments. Yahoo! has seemed to have learned the error of pride, they are now trying the meritorious way. I think it will pay off.
(I view FB's strategy as Mobile first. ~70% of their revenue is now mobile. Which is 4x what Yahoo! currently makes.)
Who is Yahoo trying to target with all of these acquisitions? The only person I know who interfaces with the yahoo brand is my mom, because she doesn't know how to change her homepage.
I don't use tumblr so I'm not sure if they've found a way to get those users flowing to yahoo, but it seems like they would be completely contradictory demographics anyways. Same deal with with polyvore.
Lots of opinions, but I'd start by inverting your question. Clearly Yahoo! gets a lot of traffic, and there are literally billions of people on the net, and unless you are an extreme extrovert the number of people you "know" is probably less than a couple hundred. Conversely if everyone you knew thought Yahoo! was the stupidest thing on the planet, statistically that would be representative of less than .1% of the available population. Which is why, starting from that position in terms of understanding something, will often lead you astray.
Wikipedia, citing Alexa's numbers, put Yahoo! at the #5 most popular web sites. Way higher than places like Reddit or Stack Overflow (sites which correlate strongly with hn readership). So that tells us that a lot of people (including people who can change their home page) voluntarily visit Yahoo! on a regular basis.
So clearly Yahoo! knows something about the people who are visiting their site that you and I don't. And I'm guessing they decided a lot of them liked Polyvore too and so adding that into the mix is a good thing. That said, I continue to find Yahoo! strategy hard to figure out, especially with respect to what kind of site they think they are.
You may not be their target demographic, but Polyvore is certainly far from that. At 20M uniques per month, 2.4M new sets per month, $22M raised, 150 employees, highest AOV of all social media sites (ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter), Polyvore is literally the highest converting social platform of them all. They're a pillar of the fashion community.
And I heard they were profitable, which when combined with all those #s, makes the low acquisition price really fishy. $60m for all that is way too cheap. Maybe Polyvore's CEO panic sold or had terrible bankers, but with $22M raised you would expect a professional board to have control and to be much more experienced. Growth could have totally stalled, or worse, started to reverse. I'd bet there's more to this story.
They may be important, but the argument against them isn't just not understanding their market.
If they were a strongly profitable, or even high revenue-generating, company then the announcement wouldn't be about strengthening Yahoo's digital portfolio or expanding their reach in mobile, social, and native. It would be yelling about the cash flow potential.
Site visits, money raised, and number of employees are not business metrics.
My point was related to them being incorrectly labeled as "least known" - site visits is directly relevant to that. As for the impetus behind the acquisition, I'm not one to speculate.
Yahoo! simply boggles my mind. I have no idea what they do well as a tech company anymore or why they're still around. Their homepage spams with news about Kardashians and other celebrities along with horribly written articles by Yahoo! journalists. Every once in a great while you'll read a great but rare REPOST from AP, NPR and other major news sources. Otherwise, they're squeezing every drop of any kind of mediocre news about a cat getting stuck on a tree with a 10 minute video description performed by some Yahoo! bubblehead.
They've shutdown any interesting projects like pipes, maps, search or any other area of innovation. Anything that's still around is just rotting on the outskirts of internet. When was the last time anyone heard of YUI? The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages. They're purchasing these random startups and generally show lack of any direction. It just seems like their execs get in the room together and go "What the fuck are we gonna do today, boys? Let's buy a fashion startup! Do we need it? No, but who gives a shit. Our users sure don't." And I genuinely think that most users don't. They're just stuck on Yahoo! because they don't know how to change their default homepage.
I don't know... I'm just glad they haven't killed Flickr yet and I have a place to follow some great photographers.
I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this opinion. It just reeks of ignorance and short-sightedness.
Polyvore is far from a "fashion startup". It has a very substantial user base and their whole proposal allows for very natural (and kinda cool) monetization strategies. Also, we don't know how much Yahoo paid for it, it could've been a real bargain; apparently around 60M, kind of cheap if you consider they've been pulling profit from years now.
You want examples of real companies that seem to be adrift? Try looking at Twitter. Or Google (although they have some real good products that keep the ship floating).
I see Google a little adrift in many of their new ventures, from Google+ to date. But, however, they maintain a pretty solid strategy in the fundamental products that generate most of it revenue, which is pretty much the ad market.
I think that the urge to diversify their money, coupled with, "well, we have a lot of money" is causing Google to invest in many things that eventually turn to dead-ends. That makes Google seem a little adrift, from my perspective, but nothing that would put their business at risk.
They gave us* another season of Community, so that was cool.
*Although what they gave me specifically was "Geo Restriction - Sorry! The content provider has not given us the rights to play this video in your location." It's the thought that counts I guess
Yahoo! mostly attracts Mid-Western housewives. They know their users pretty well. I read somewhere Facebook's ~30% of users are mostly of these Yahoo! types. And these users are probably more likely to stick around. Hey, the internet is for everyone! :)
I have an almost 16-year-old email account with Yahoo that I started forwarding mail from a couple of years ago. I'd love to close it but it's hard to get rid of something that's been around for that long.
Basically purchase aspiring start-ups that hit some troubled time scaling (Polyvore seemed to be running into some monetization issues). By putting the digital properties into Yahoo's network, the acquired company get lots of free traffic + better monetization (Yahoo already has a great brand sales department + the data Yahoo might have on people could make more engaging ad programmes).