How Yahoo Makes Money

from the not-the-way-Semel-expected dept

When Terry Semel first came to Yahoo from Warner Brothers, everyone assumed he’d try to turn Yahoo into something more like a media company, packaging up content and trying to sell it to users. He made it a point to say that advertising was going to become less important, and what advertising they did do would be much more intrusive. It turns out, a few years later, that none of that came true – but at least Semel realized he was wrong. Yahoo’s attempts at selling content have been a flop, and the intrusive ads haven’t been their money makers. Instead, it’s online services that connect people (personals, email) and text ads on search results that have kept Yahoo going strong. In other words, Yahoo has discovered that the internet isn’t TV. While Semel may have had the wrong idea originally, at least he’s been figuring out as he went along.


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