Yahoo: ‘Everything But The Kitchen Sink’ Approach Not Paying Dividends
There’s been a lot of hand wringing in the media over the weekend about Yahoo’s rejection of Microsoft’s takeover bid. Most of the coverage has focused on the (very serious) financial and people issues that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang is now facing. But let’s turn some attention to Yahoo’s product line for a moment. How will that be affected? Remember the Peanut Butter Manifesto? Or Jerry Yang’s 100 days of strategic planning? Both aimed to create a more streamlined and focused product range. Yet nearly a year later, it’s still ‘everything but the kitchen sink’. And the shareholders are pissed.
According to comScore, Yahoo recently slipped from the number 1 spot in the list of top Web properties in the US. In April 2008 Google became number 1 for the first time [although interesting to note that if AOL was combined with Time Warner, as it appeared to be in 2007, they would be number 1 UPDATE: a couple of commenters pointed out that it is Unique Visitors and so there'd be some overlap if AOL and TW were combined; so they wouldn't be #1]:
One year ago, you can see that Yahoo had a reasonably healthy lead:
comScore’s CEO noted that Google took the top property position “thanks to continued search growth and rapid growth at YouTube”. We knew search was causing Yahoo (and Microsoft) major grief in website growth, but interesting that Google’s 07 acquisition YouTube is also contributing to Yahoo’s woes.