Welcome to this edition of Adam Ginsberg's "Insiders" Newsletter. Each issue is designed to provide you with insights, tips, secrets and overall strategies on how you can build your online auctions business. I'm sure you love this issue! This week will give you some insite into the world of Yahoo!.
Do you Yahoo!?
"Charting the Growth of an Internet Legend"
eBay is the 5th most visited website on the planet...Yahoo! is #1. To be truly successful, you must subscribe to the concept of "Multiple Streams of Online Income". In this issue we'll learn why it's important to Yahoo!
So, do you Yahoo!? If you use the Internet, the answer to that ad slogan is most likely “yes”. Yahoo! Is consistently ranked as the #1 English language site at Alexa.com and also consistently ranks as the #1 International brand according to Nielson Net-Ratings reports.
Over the past 12 years, the site has grown from the grassroots dream of a few tech geeks into an international Internet giant that measures its profits in the billions of dollars, constantly evolving in the face of competitors and an ever-expanding Internet.
Yahoo! has been around since January 1994, which doesn’t seem all that impressive until you put it into perspective. Back then, most people were still using MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. The Internet was a luxury that few people outside of the military or educational institutions had access to, but it was still growing at a tremendous rate.
In 1993, Mosaic 1.0 was released – the first real web browser. According to statistics compiled by Matthew Gray of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there were only about 130 websites in June of 1993 – with only 2 of them belonging to a .com domain.
By June 1994, that number had grown to approximately 2,738 websites with 425 having a .com address. The growth of the Internet was growing dramatically. By the end of 1994, just 6 months later, there were over 10,000 websites with approximately 3,500 having a .com address.
Before Yahoo! went live, finding information on the Internet was a challenge. There was Archie (named by removing the “v” from “archive”), but that only indexed FTP sites, which were very popular at the time because they offered the easiest way to share files across the Internet.
Most university, library, company, and research computers used a technology called Gopher to organize the contents of their servers into hierarchical lists, but there was no way to search all of the servers at once. Home users were still dialing into BBS (Bulletin Board System) message boards, which let users chat, send email, and send files locally, but again there was no way to search every BBS nationally.
Even as Archie, Gopher, and BBS computers were eventually connected to the Internet, there was no good way to find out about them. It seems ridiculous to today’s Internet users, but imagine loading up your web browser and suddenly discovering that every search engine was gone. The only way to connect to another computer on the Internet in that case is to type its exact domain name into your web browser…but how do you find the domain names of the websites you want to visit?
That was the solution that Jerry Yang and David Filo – two electrical engineering doctorate candidates at Stanford – faced in 1994. To keep track of their favorite sites, they created a list that they maintained for their personal use. Eventually the list got so long that they decided to break it down into various categories. Then, they decided to turn their catalog of favorites into a website called: “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.
Back in 1994 the Internet was used by a small number of people, and any site as useful as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was bookmarked by pretty much everybody. As the site grew in size and popularity (thanks to word-of-mouth advertising), Yang and Filo knew they were on to something and take their idea to the next level. They gave it a new name - Yahoo! – which the company claims is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, although Yang and Filo have denied that claim at various times.
By March 1995 Yahoo! was incorporated. Just over a year later, on April 12 1996, the company filed for it’s successful IPO. Although Yang and Filo haven’t completed their doctorates, they are now billionaires who still work at the company the created just over 12 years ago.
How long have you been online? I can still remember using Yahoo! when it was first launched on my 14.4k modem…
Yahoo! Today
Today Yahoo! is an enormous company with a market cap of more than $50 billion. In an average month, the site delivers about 73 billion web pages to 345 million worldwide users, and it has evolved from a simple directory of sites into a full-fledged web portal designed as a one-stop-shop to suit the needs of nearly any visitor.
The company’s goal now is to “provide users with the information they want, when they want it, how they want it, and on any device,” and it’s accomplishing that in a variety of ways.
The company’s search engine has received major improvements over the years to shift through the billions of web pages that have appeared since the founding of Yahoo!. Yahoo! also provides reams of its own content, much of it licensed from respected publications such as Consumer Reports, Sports Illustrated, Business Week Online, Reuters, the Associated Press, and many others.
There’s a lot to like about Yahoo!, but perhaps the main reason for the site’s popularity is the staggering number of services it offers to users. At last count, anyone with a Yahoo! account can access nearly 120 services, and that number is growing all the time as Yahoo! snaps up tech companies and continues to research its own technologies. Here’s a partial list of Yahoo! services:
- Yahoo! Mail
- Yahoo! Messenger
- Yahoo! Photos & Filter
- Yahoo! 360
- Yahoo! Mobile
- Yahoo! Widgets
- Yahoo! Money
The Future of Yahoo!
Yahoo! makes a TON of money. This gives Yahoo! the Ability to continue growing at a tremendous pace, and the site is poised to become bigger and better in the future. Yahoo!, in December ’05 acquired Del.icio.us, a website with more than 300,000 users that lets people easily share their favorite websites and links with friends and family members.
Yahoo! also recently acquired upcoming.org, a calendar and scheduling web site. Both of these sites rely heavily on social networking, so it’s a safe bet that the technology they use will find it’s way into Yahoo! 360.
In just the last few weeks, Yahoo! partnered with eBay to provide advertising to eBay members and the eBay community.
Until the next issue...
Knowing No Boundaries
Adam Ginsberg
AdamGinsberg.com
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