Why Yahoo failed to attract advertiser?

 Currently, in 12^th September 2013, Womack & MacMillan (2013) reported that although Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) has increased 20 percent of active user, which had surpass 800million, yet, it still failed to attract advertiser. Those advertisers continue to shift their target to Google and Facebook Inc. (FB). This led Yahoo’s share of the $17.5 billion market for display ads slipped from 9.2 percent to 7.9 percent. However, Mayer seem upbeat about the core business, she continued to change the web portal and services. Also, she involved in acquisition spree whereby Yahoo had bought 19 companies in order to compete with other competitors.

In my opinion, nowadays, people tend to use mobile devise compare with others, thus mobile traffic currently become more and more important. Although it seem that Yahoo have a lot of active user, however, it has lesser mobile traffic which makes it less impressive (Hof 2013). Google which financially backed Android has makes the Google apps in Android system needs to register a Gmail account. This lead to a strong mobile traffic on Google compared to Yahoo. This can be the reason why advertiser and investor prefer Google instead of Yahoo.

Besides that, I realized that Yahoo targets more on businessman. Thus, Yahoo’s market might have less competition compare to Google and Facebook which have wider target market ranged from businessman to youngster. This is a major factor that attracts advertiser to invest in Google and Facebook as their advertisements not only reach a large number of audiences but also wider range of audience type. In this case, Yahoo started to pay attention on this issue and revamping the web portal to attract young adult (Vatu 2013). In addition, Yahoo also bought some of the companies to compete with Facebook such as Tumblr and Flickr. Its aim is to increase younger user and their market segment. This seems to be effective whereby the share and stock of yahoo had increased that day (Isidore 2013). Also, it increases the interest and confident of some investors as well.

Last but not least, I believe that the increasing number of active user is because of the efforts Mayer made. She requested Yahoo user to re-activate their account or else it will be closed. This has been reported by Blair (2013) from USA today on June 14, “Yahoo said it would start to free up Yahoo IDs that have been inactive for at least a year by resetting them and giving them away to people who request them (or giving them a "fresh start," as Yahoo said in a Tumblr post announcing the move.” This technique might be a good technique that notifies the user to re-used Yahoo account and increase the traffic. However, some people claimed that it is not a good idea. A security expert Graham Cluley had pointed out some of the reason why it is not a good idea (Hill 2013).He mentioned that some users might use Yahoo as the alternative email in order to create Gmail or Hotmail. This may cause damage to the user who forgets their password for the account. Also, he said that some user might not use their account for one year but they might need to access to the content in the future. This claim somehow will influence the perception and view of some user and they will refuse to use Yahoo. This may also lead the advertisers to shift their budget to others platform.

In this case, I agree with Graham Cluley as I am one of the users of Yahoo account. Although I did not log in to the Yahoo account frequently, I do use it while accessing to my Wretch account.  If I am not aware of this problem and my account was closed, my Wretch account may be closed as well. It is understandable that Yahoo have to free up some inactive account for new user but it can be done in some other ways. For example, Yahoo can inform all the users that they need to deactivate those inactive accounts through a platform. They can ask permission from the user whether they want to continue the use of Yahoo account or to deactivate it. Also, they can provide the procedure to the user to backup all their data and information into a rar file before they close the account. Besides that, they should customize the look and function of Yahoo in order to attract new users. They can build some special features that are convenient for the users too. As a result, it still able to build a good reputation and image to the user, advertiser and investor although it may take some time.

Resources

Blair, N 2013, USA Today, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/06/14/inactive-yahoo-email-accounts-reset/2425089/>

Hill, K 2013, Forbes, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/19/yahoos-dirty-trick-to-force-people-to-use-their-products-again/>

Hof, R 2013, Forbes, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/21/yahoo-tops-google-as-biggest-website-says-comscore-even-without-tumblr/>

Isidore, C 2013, CNN Money, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/20/technology/yahoo-buys-tumblr/index.html>

Vatu, G 2013, Softpedia, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://news.softpedia.com/news/Yahoo-to-Target-a-Younger-Audience-Through-Advertising-Reuters-353409.shtml>

Womack, B & MacMillan, D 2013, Bloomberg, viewed 16 September 2013, <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-11/yahoo-s-mayer-says-monthly-users-climbed-20-in-august.html>