Yahoo! declared to lay off 600 people… sounds a lot. It is about 5% of its total workforce.
What has happened to Yahoo?
In the past, we discussed already how Yahoo has been hard hit by Google for the past eight years. More and more visitors turn to Google for search results.
Some time ago, I heard about its CEO stating that Yahoo has never been focusing on its search business, rather it was focusing on content providing. What?
It was surprising to me, in which I always perceived Yahoo! as a long-term competitor to Google for its search services. From time to time, I read about the search market share of Yahoo! against Google and MSN (now Bing).
Still, I will regard Yahoo!’s failure is due to the fact that it fails to focus on its businesses it claims to concentrate on.
Google, on the other hand, is able to leverage its search service as core business. The AdWords PPC program helps generate most of the revenue of Google. The AdWords program allows Google intelligently place its Client’s advertisement not only on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP) but also its AdSense partners’ websites.
It can then utilize its revenue stream to support various service ventures for different products like Gmail, Google Map, Android – the mobile phone platform, etc. Also it also gets into some new businesses fast by acquisitions like Youtube, AdMob, etc.
Today, Google still keeps on refining its search ranking alogoirthm, trying to return the best “user’s experience” to its search customers. To name a few, for example: the recent adoptions of local search results based on a visitor’s location; the inclusion of images and videos in its search results; the translation service helping people to understand the web pages’ contents returned by its search pages, etc.
I can see Google grows stronger and stronger, every day. But on the other hand, Yahoo is still struggling to find its right direction.
Personally, I don’t want to see Yahoo dying. Its failure would leave behind in the market the only remaining player after Google —Microsoft’ Bing.
That gives us as a web advertiser too few choices to choose when we have to advertise online.
I have already felt the pain of higher and higher AdWords charge when doing PPC on Google’s Adwords. It is simply because it is the best single platform almost everyone is using now for online advertisement.
Competition to use this platform drives the price up.
Related Readings: List of Acquisitions by Google, Yahoo lays off 600 people
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