Original synthesis to sit alongside the encyclopedia article below. Not part of Wikipedia; verify facts on Wikipedia when precision matters.
Yahoo is a US-based multinational internet technology company, originally founded as a web navigation tool and later evolved into a global leading portal, search engine and internet service provider. It has undergone multiple business transformations and ownership changes over its development history.
Key moments
Yahoo's competitive landscape has shifted dramatically across its development stages:
Yahoo is a pioneering internet brand with decades of global market presence, built on its early role as a foundational web directory and portal that introduced hundreds of millions of users to the consumer World Wide Web. Its brand identity is deeply tied to the early growth of the public internet, giving it extraordinary legacy recognition across generations of digital users. Despite multiple strategic pivots, ownership restructurings, and major market share shifts in core segments like search, Yahoo continues to maintain an active footprint in digital content, email services, and digital advertising, preserving meaningful brand recall among both long-time users and casual audiences.
The brand has navigated decades of major industry disruptions, from the rise of algorithmic search to the global shift toward social media and short-form content, adapting through strategic partnerships like its long-running search collaboration with Microsoft Bing to remain a viable part of the global digital ecosystem. While it no longer holds the dominant market position it enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s, its established loyal user base for flagship services like Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance keeps it a relevant player in the digital advertising space.
Yahoo no longer holds leading market share in core segments like general search or digital media, having been outpaced by dominant competitors such as Google and Meta in recent decades. Its current role as a partner rather than independent primary operator of search further reduces its overall market leadership position, though it retains minor niche leadership in specific legacy services like web-based email and mainstream financial news aggregation for older user demographics.
Yahoo maintains steady ongoing user interaction through its established base of long-time users of services like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Finance, with consistent daily engagement from its existing core audience. However, it sees very limited new user acquisition compared to modern digital platforms, and overall interaction depth is far lower than leading social media or search competitors, as many users only access its services for specific legacy use cases rather than as a primary daily digital destination.
Yahoo has not achieved significant brand growth or expansion into new high-growth digital segments in recent years, with most of its activity focused on retaining its existing legacy user base rather than pursuing aggressive new growth initiatives. Frequent strategic shifts and ongoing ownership changes have also prevented consistent momentum for new brand development, resulting in a largely stagnant overall growth trajectory for the brand.
After multiple high-profile ownership changes and large-scale business restructurings over the past 15 years, Yahoo has stabilized its current business model around its partnership with Microsoft Bing and its existing portfolio of legacy content and communication services. It maintains a consistent level of advertising revenue from its loyal user base, though the lack of clear long-term strategic direction leaves some uncertainty around the brand's ongoing stability.
Founded in 1994, Yahoo is one of the oldest surviving consumer internet brands, with over three decades of continuous public market presence. Its long history has built deep, widespread legacy brand recognition, which contributes positively to its overall brand strength through decades of accumulated user familiarity, even as it has overhauled its business model multiple times over its lifespan.
As a pioneering internet brand, Yahoo played a foundational role in shaping the early consumer internet industry, popularizing free public web directories, free consumer email, and general audience web portals that set the template for modern consumer internet services. While it is no longer a major innovator or trendsetter in current digital industry development, its enormous historical impact keeps its industry profile high, and it remains a notable incumbent player in the global digital advertising market.
Yahoo established a widespread global presence early in its corporate development, with localized versions of its services launched in dozens of countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. While it has reduced operations in some smaller emerging markets in recent years and faces strong local competition in most high-growth regions, it still retains a broad global footprint of users and maintains recognizable regional brand presence across most major global markets.
AI-based analysis can provide structured reasoning to support assessment of a brand's relative value based on public market context and historical performance, but any derived estimates are illustrative and not independently audited. For a fully verified, professional audited assessment of Yahoo's current brand value, please contact World Brand Lab directly.
Yahoo (, styled yahoo! in its logo)[4] is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life,[5] and its advertising platform, Yahoo Native. It is operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon.
Yahoo was established by Jerry Yang
The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle"[9] or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".[10] The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work.[11] However, founders Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."[12] This meaning derives from the Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web".[13][14][15][16] The site was a human-edited web directory, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!" and became known as the Yahoo Directory.[14][17][18][19][20] The "yahoo.com" domain was registered on January 18, 1995.[21]
Yahoo was incorporated on March 2, 1995. In 1995, a search engine function, called Yahoo Search, was introduced. This allowed users to search Yahoo Directory.[22][23] Yahoo soon became the first popular online directory and search engine on the World Wide Web.[24]
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo became a public company via an initial public offering in April 1996 and its stock price rose 600% within two years.[25] Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services including Excite, Lycos, and America Online.[26] By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users,[27] and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine,[19] receiving 95 million page views per day, triple that of rival Excite.[25] It also made many high-profile acquisitions.
Yahoo had two opportunities to acquire Google that it did not pursue. In 1998, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[33][34]
A more significant opportunity arose in 2002, when Yahoo's then-CEO, Terry Semel, entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.[33] The failure to acquire Google in this second instance is widely considered one of the largest strategic errors in corporate history.[35]
Yahoo began using Google
In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion.[42][43] Yahoo Inc. rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Although Microsoft increased its bid to $47 billion, Yahoo insisted on another 10%+ increase to the offer and Microsoft cancelled the offer in May 2008.[44][45][46][47]
In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites were guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine after payment.[48] While financially lucrative, this paid inclusion program drew criticism from marketers due to costs and public frustration over the lack of distinction between paid and organic listings.[49] As of October 2006, Paid Inclusion ceased to guarantee any commercial listing and only helped the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual URL.
In July 2009, after months of negotiation, Yahoo and Microsoft finalized a 10-year agreement known as the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance.[50] Under the terms of the alliance, Yahoo's websites would utilize Microsoft's Bing for algorithmic search results, while Yahoo's sales team became the exclusive sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers.[51] The partnership required a complex migration of Yahoo's search technology and advertising platform to Microsoft's adCenter (later rebranded to Bing Ads), with the transition for advertisers and organic search results completed in October 2010.
Yahoo! has funded spyware and adware—advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. The frequency of advertising pop-ups for spyware, generated from a partnership with advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, who had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue, could be increased or decreased based on Yahoo!'s immediate revenue needs, according to some former employees in Yahoo!'s sales department.[60][61]
Yahoo!, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, Nortel and others, has cooperated with the Chinese Communist Party in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China. Unlike Google or Microsoft, which generally keep confidential records of its users outside mainland China, Yahoo! stated that the company cannot protect the privacy and confidentiality of its mainland Chinese customers from the authorities.[62] Critics say that the companies put profits before principles.[63] Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders state that it is "ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor."[64]
As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005.[77] Yahoo! News' message board section was closed December 19, 2006, due to the trolling phenomenon.[78] In addition, in mid-October 2008, Yahoo! deleted all information in millions of user profiles with no advance notice and little explanation.[79]
On May 25, 2006, a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www", discovered that Yahoo!'s image search brought up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. Yahoo!'s response to this was, "Yahoo! is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible".[80]
Yahoo Inc. previously owned a 14.95% stake in Alibaba, which had been criticized for facilitating the sale of shark-derived products.[81] After investing in Alibaba, Yahoo! executives were asked about this issue, and responded: "We know the sale of shark products is both legal in Asia and a centuries-old tradition. This issue is largely a cultural-practices one."[82] Alibaba would later ban the sale of shark fins on its platform in 2009.[83]
GeoCities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At the point Yahoo! purchased it in January 1999, it was reportedly the third most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.[84] Despite its popularity, it had still not become profitable by late 1998.[85]
Ten years later Yahoo! closed Geocities,[86] deleting millions of web pages in the process.[87] In September 2009, a month before it was closed, GeoCities received 10,477,049 unique visitors.[88]
Vijay Mukhi, an internet and cybersecurity expert quoted in the Business Standard
Upon her arrival, Mayer implemented several significant cultural and strategic changes. One of her first major policy decisions in 2013 was to revoke the company's remote work option, requiring all employees to work from the office to foster a more collaborative culture.[90] She also initiated an aggressive acquisition strategy, purchasing over 50 startups, many of which were small, mobile-focused companies in an "acqui-hiring" approach to bring in new engineering talent.[91]
Mayer's efforts to revitalize company culture included a controversial quarterly performance review (QPR) system implemented in 2013. The system required managers to rank employees on a bell curve, with those at the bottom often being terminated.[92] The policy was unpopular with many employees and led to a 2016 lawsuit from a former manager who alleged the system was used to conduct illegal mass layoffs.[93][94]
In June 2013, Yahoo Inc. acquired blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash.[114][115] While the acquisition was intended to attract a younger audience, it failed to meet revenue targets. In 2016, Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr's value, acknowledging the acquisition had not paid off.[116] Verizon later sold Tumblr in 2019 for a fraction of its purchase price.[117]
In November 2014, Yahoo Inc. acquired Cooliris; it was subsequently shut down.[118]
In December 2014, Yahoo Inc. acquired video advertising provider BrightRoll
On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced the acquisition of Yahoo's core Internet business for $4.83 billion.[120][121] The deal, which excluded Yahoo's stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, was delayed by the revelation of major data breaches.[122][123] On February 21, 2017, Verizon lowered its purchase price for Yahoo by $350 million and reached an agreement to share liabilities regarding the data breaches.[124][125] On June 13, 2017, Verizon completed the acquisition and Marissa Mayer resigned.
In September 2021, investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management acquired 90% of Yahoo.[131] In November 2021, Yahoo announced that it was ending operations in mainland China due to the increasingly challenging business and legal environment.[132]
In February 2023, Yahoo announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce (more than 1,600 employees) by the end of the year as part of a major restructuring of its ad tech division.[133] Following the acquisition by Apollo, CEO Jim Lanzone initiated a strategy focused on a potential "turnaround", emphasizing the integration of artificial intelligence across Yahoo's products.[134] This strategy included several key acquisitions, such as Commonstock in 2023 and the AI-driven news platform Artifact in 2024.[135]
In October 2019, a former Yahoo engineer, Reyes Daniel Ruiz, pleaded guilty to federal charges of illegally accessing user accounts. Ruiz had hacked about 6,000 users' accounts, including those of his friends, co-workers and many young women, seeking sexual images and videos.[137][138]
The company reported two major data breaches of user account data to hackers during the second half of 2016. The first announced breach, reported in September 2016, had occurred sometime in late 2014, and affected over 500 million Yahoo! user accounts.[139] A separate data breach, occurring earlier around August 2013, was reported in December 2016, and affected over 1 billion user accounts.[140] Both breaches are considered the largest discovered in the history of the Internet. Specific details of material taken include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords.[141] Further, Yahoo! reported that the late 2014 breach likely used manufactured web cookies to falsify login credentials, allowing hackers to gain access to any account without a password.[142][143]
On September 11, 2001, Yahoo announced its partnership with FIFA for the 2002 FIFA World Cup and 2006 FIFA World Cup tournaments. It was one of FIFA's 15 partners at the tournaments. The deal included co-branding the organization's websites.[158]
Yahoo sponsored the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.[159] NBC Sports Group aligned with Yahoo Sports the same year with content and program offerings on mobile and desktop platforms.[160]
Yahoo announced television video partnerships in 2013 with Condé Nast,[161] WWE, ABC NEWS, and CNBC.[162] Yahoo entered into a 10-year collaboration in 2014, as a founding partner of Levi's Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers.[163]
The National Basketball Association partnered with Yahoo Sports to stream games, offer virtual and augmented-reality fan experiences, and in 2018 NBA League Pass.[164][165] Yahoo Sportsbook launched in November 2019, a collaboration with BetMGM.[166][167]
BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Yahoo in November 2020, in a stock deal with Yahoo as a minority shareholder.[168][169] The NFL partnered with Yahoo in 2020, to introduce a new "Watch Together" function on the Yahoo Sports app for interactive co-viewing through a synchronized livestream of local and primetime NFL games.[170] The Paley Center for Media collaborated with Verizon Media to exclusively stream programs on Yahoo platforms beginning in 2020.[171]
Yahoo became the main sponsor for the Pramac Racing team and the first title sponsor for the 2021 ESport/MotoGP Championship season.[172] Yahoo, the official partner for the September 2021 New York Fashion Week event also unveiled sponsorship for the Rebecca Minkoff collection via a NFT space.[173] In September 2021, it was announced that Yahoo partnered with Shopify, connecting the e-commerce merchants on Yahoo Finance, AOL and elsewhere.[174]
Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, closing at an all-time high of $118.75/share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.[32]
Yahoo had two opportunities to acquire Google that it did not pursue. In 1998, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[33][34]
A more significant opportunity arose in 2002, when Yahoo's then-CEO, Terry Semel, entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.[33] The failure to acquire Google in this second instance is widely considered one of the largest strategic errors in corporate history.[35]
Yahoo began using Google for search in June 2000.[36][37] Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004 partly using technology from its $280 million acquisition of Inktomi in 2002.[38] In 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture Services, Inc. (formerly GoTo.com) for $1.63 billion.[39] The deal was a strategic move to bolster its search advertising revenue in the face of growing competition from Google, as Overture was a pioneer in pay-per-click advertising.[40] In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. In 2008, the company laid off hundreds of people as it struggled from competition.[41]
In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion.[42][43] Yahoo Inc. rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Although Microsoft increased its bid to $47 billion, Yahoo insisted on another 10%+ increase to the offer and Microsoft cancelled the offer in May 2008.[44][45][46][47]
Carol Bartz, former CEO of Autodesk, replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009.[53] In September 2011, she was fired by chairman Roy J. Bostock. The dismissal happened over the phone, a fact Bartz promptly communicated to employees in a widely publicized company-wide email.[54] CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.[55][56]
In August 2010, Yahoo! Groups started rolling out a major software change. This change was denounced by a vast majority of users.[57] On September 29, 2010, Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Yahoo!'s Communities products, announced that based on members feedback, Yahoo! Groups would be rolling back the recent changes.[58]
After the brief tenure of Scott Thompson, who was replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo appointed Google executive Marissa Mayer as president and CEO, effective July 17, 2012.[59]
Yahoo! has funded spyware and adware—advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. The frequency of advertising pop-ups for spyware, generated from a partnership with advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, who had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue, could be increased or decreased based on Yahoo!'s immediate revenue needs, according to some former employees in Yahoo!'s sales department.[60][61]
Yahoo!, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, Nortel and others, has cooperated with the Chinese Communist Party in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China. Unlike Google or Microsoft, which generally keep confidential records of its users outside mainland China, Yahoo! stated that the company cannot protect the privacy and confidentiality of its mainland Chinese customers from the authorities.[62] Critics say that the companies put profits before principles.[63] Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders state that it is "ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor."[64]
In September 2005, Reporters Without Borders reported that in April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no. 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secrets" were a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo! Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.[65]
The verdict as published by the Chinese government stated that Shi Tao had sent the email through an anonymous Yahoo! account, that Yahoo! Holdings (the Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo) told the Chinese government that the IP address used to send the email was registered by the Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for, and that police went straight to his offices and picked him up.
In February 2006, Yahoo! General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S. Congress in which Yahoo! denied knowing the true nature of the case against Shi Tao.[66] In April 2006, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) was investigated by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.
On 2 June 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (NUJ) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo! Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China.[67]
In July 2007, evidence surfaced detailing the warrant which the Chinese authorities sent to Yahoo! officials, highlighting "State Secrets" as the charge against Shi Tao. The warrant requests to provide "all login times, corresponding IP addresses, and relevant email content from February 22, 2004, to present." for email ID "huoyan1989"[68][69][70] Analyst reports and human rights organizations have said that this evidence directly contradicts Yahoo!'s testimony before the U.S. Congress in February 2006.[71]
Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.
In February 2006, Reporters Without Borders released Chinese court documents stating that Yahoo! aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003, Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".
Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.
In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo! group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo! assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison.[72]
On April 18, 2007, Xiaoning's wife Yu Ling sued Yahoo! under human rights laws in federal court in San Francisco, California, United States.[73] Wang Xiaoning is named as a plaintiff in the Yahoo! suit, which was filed with help from the World Organization for Human Rights USA. "Yahoo! is guilty of 'an act of corporate irresponsibility,' said Morton Sklar, executive director of the group. "Yahoo! had reason to know that if they provided China with identification information that those individuals would be arrested."[74]
Yahoo!'s decision to assist China's authoritarian government came as part of a policy of reconciling its services with the Chinese government's policies. This came after China blocked Yahoo! services for a time. As reported in The Washington Post and many media sources:
Human rights organizations groups are basing their case on a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed:
On August 28, 2007, the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo! for allegedly passing information (email and IP address) with the Chinese government that caused the arrests of writers and dissidents. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco for journalists, Shi Tao, and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo! stated that it supported privacy and free expression for it worked with other technology companies to solve human rights concerns.[75]
On November 6, 2007, the US congressional panel criticised Yahoo! for not giving full details to the House Foreign Affairs Committee the previous year, stating it had been "at best inexcusably negligent" and at worst "deceptive".[76]
As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005.[77] Yahoo! News' message board section was closed December 19, 2006, due to the trolling phenomenon.[78] In addition, in mid-October 2008, Yahoo! deleted all information in millions of user profiles with no advance notice and little explanation.[79]
On May 25, 2006, a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www", discovered that Yahoo!'s image search brought up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. Yahoo!'s response to this was, "Yahoo! is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible".[80]
Yahoo Inc. previously owned a 14.95% stake in Alibaba, which had been criticized for facilitating the sale of shark-derived products.[81] After investing in Alibaba, Yahoo! executives were asked about this issue, and responded: "We know the sale of shark products is both legal in Asia and a centuries-old tradition. This issue is largely a cultural-practices one."[82] Alibaba would later ban the sale of shark fins on its platform in 2009.[83]
GeoCities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At the point Yahoo! purchased it in January 1999, it was reportedly the third most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.[84] Despite its popularity, it had still not become profitable by late 1998.[85]
Ten years later Yahoo! closed Geocities,[86] deleting millions of web pages in the process.[87] In September 2009, a month before it was closed, GeoCities received 10,477,049 unique visitors.[88]
Vijay Mukhi, an internet and cybersecurity expert quoted in the Business Standard, criticized Yahoo's management of GeoCities; Mukhi described GeoCities as "a lost opportunity for Yahoo!", adding that "they could have made it a
Upon her arrival, Mayer implemented several significant cultural and strategic changes. One of her first major policy decisions in 2013 was to revoke the company's remote work option, requiring all employees to work from the office to foster a more collaborative culture.[90] She also initiated an aggressive acquisition strategy, purchasing over 50 startups, many of which were small, mobile-focused companies in an "acqui-hiring" approach to bring in new engineering talent.[91]
Mayer's efforts to revitalize company culture included a controversial quarterly performance review (QPR) system implemented in 2013. The system required managers to rank employees on a bell curve, with those at the bottom often being terminated.[92] The policy was unpopular with many employees and led to a 2016 lawsuit from a former manager who alleged the system was used to conduct illegal mass layoffs.[93][94]
In June 2013, Yahoo Inc. acquired blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash.[114][115] While the acquisition was intended to attract a younger audience, it failed to meet revenue targets. In 2016, Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr's value, acknowledging the acquisition had not paid off.[116] Verizon later sold Tumblr in 2019 for a fraction of its purchase price.[117]
In November 2014, Yahoo Inc. acquired Cooliris; it was subsequently shut down.[118]
In December 2014, Yahoo Inc. acquired video advertising provider BrightRoll for $583 million; it was subsequently consolidated into Yahoo and AOL.
On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced the acquisition of Yahoo's core Internet business for $4.83 billion.[120][121] The deal, which excluded Yahoo's stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, was delayed by the revelation of major data breaches.[122][123] On February 21, 2017, Verizon lowered its purchase price for Yahoo by $350 million and reached an agreement to share liabilities regarding the data breaches.[124][125] On June 13, 2017, Verizon completed the acquisition and Marissa Mayer resigned.[126]
In September 2021, investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management acquired 90% of Yahoo.[131] In November 2021, Yahoo announced that it was ending operations in mainland China due to the increasingly challenging business and legal environment.[132]
In February 2023, Yahoo announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce (more than 1,600 employees) by the end of the year as part of a major restructuring of its ad tech division.[133] Following the acquisition by Apollo, CEO Jim Lanzone initiated a strategy focused on a potential "turnaround", emphasizing the integration of artificial intelligence across Yahoo's products.[134] This strategy included several key acquisitions, such as Commonstock in 2023 and the AI-driven news platform Artifact in 2024.[135]
In October 2019, a former Yahoo engineer, Reyes Daniel Ruiz, pleaded guilty to federal charges of illegally accessing user accounts. Ruiz had hacked about 6,000 users' accounts, including those of his friends, co-workers and many young women, seeking sexual images and videos.[137][138]
The company reported two major data breaches of user account data to hackers during the second half of 2016. The first announced breach, reported in September 2016, had occurred sometime in late 2014, and affected over 500 million Yahoo! user accounts.[139] A separate data breach, occurring earlier around August 2013, was reported in December 2016, and affected over 1 billion user accounts.[140] Both breaches are considered the largest discovered in the history of the Internet. Specific details of material taken include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords.[141] Further, Yahoo! reported that the late 2014 breach likely used manufactured web cookies to falsify login credentials, allowing hackers to gain access to any account without a password.[142][143]
In September 2005, Reporters Without Borders reported that in April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no. 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secrets" were a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo! Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.[65]
The verdict as published by the Chinese government stated that Shi Tao had sent the email through an anonymous Yahoo! account, that Yahoo! Holdings (the Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo) told the Chinese government that the IP address used to send the email was registered by the Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for, and that police went straight to his offices and picked him up.
In February 2006, Yahoo! General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S. Congress in which Yahoo! denied knowing the true nature of the case against Shi Tao.[66] In April 2006, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) was investigated by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.
On 2 June 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (NUJ) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo! Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China.[67]
In July 2007, evidence surfaced detailing the warrant which the Chinese authorities sent to Yahoo! officials, highlighting "State Secrets" as the charge against Shi Tao. The warrant requests to provide "all login times, corresponding IP addresses, and relevant email content from February 22, 2004, to present." for email ID "huoyan1989"[68][69][70] Analyst reports and human rights organizations have said that this evidence directly contradicts Yahoo!'s testimony before the U.S. Congress in February 2006.[71]
Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.
In February 2006, Reporters Without Borders released Chinese court documents stating that Yahoo! aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003, Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".
Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.
In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo! group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo! assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison.[72]
On April 18, 2007, Xiaoning's wife Yu Ling sued Yahoo! under human rights laws in federal court in San Francisco, California, United States.[73] Wang Xiaoning is named as a plaintiff in the Yahoo! suit, which was filed with help from the World Organization for Human Rights USA. "Yahoo! is guilty of 'an act of corporate irresponsibility,' said Morton Sklar, executive director of the group. "Yahoo! had reason to know that if they provided China with identification information that those individuals would be arrested."[74]
Yahoo!'s decision to assist China's authoritarian government came as part of a policy of reconciling its services with the Chinese government's policies. This came after China blocked Yahoo! services for a time. As reported in The Washington Post and many media sources:
Human rights organizations groups are basing their case on a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed:
On August 28, 2007, the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo! for allegedly passing information (email and IP address) with the Chinese government that caused the arrests of writers and dissidents. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco for journalists, Shi Tao, and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo! stated that it supported privacy and free expression for it worked with other technology companies to solve human rights concerns.[75]
On November 6, 2007, the US congressional panel criticised Yahoo! for not giving full details to the House Foreign Affairs Committee the previous year, stating it had been "at best inexcusably negligent" and at worst "deceptive".[76]
In November 2009, Yahoo was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending a DMCA notice to whistleblower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures on obtaining personal data of Yahoo's subscribers.[99]
In September 2011, after some concerns over censorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.[100][101][102]
On May 20, 2013, Flickr, Yahoo!'s image and video hosting website, unveiled a redesigned layout and additional features, including one terabyte of free storage for all users, seamless photostream, cover photo and updated Android App.[103][104] The redesigned layout fills the page with dynamically re-sized photos and, on the home page, displays recent comments on photos. Tech Radar described the new style Flickr as representing a "sea change" in its purpose.[105] Many users criticized the changes, and the site's help forum received thousands of negative comments.[106]
In January 2014, a large scale malware attack was discovered by Fox IT in the Netherlands that was targeted at Java and dated back to December 30, 2013, especially affecting users in Romania, France, and the UK and being delivered to 300,000 Yahoo! users per hour when they discovered it. Yahoo! was criticized for not providing any public guidance on the number of users affected or advice on what the affected users should do.[107][108]
In October 2016, Scott Ard, a prominent editorial director fired from Yahoo in 2015, filed a lawsuit accusing Mayer of leading a sexist campaign to purge male employees. Ard, a male employee, stated "Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of [an employee performance-rating system] to accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo's male employees". In the suit, Ard claimed that, prior to his firing, he had received "fully satisfactory" performance reviews since starting at the company in 2011 as head of editorial programming for Yahoo's home page, yet he was relieved of his role that was given to a woman who had been recently hired by Megan Lieberman, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo News.[109][110] The lawsuit states:"Liberman stated that she was terminating [Ard] because she had not received a requested breakdown of [his] duties. [Ard] had already provided that very information as requested, however, and reminded Liberman that he had done so. Liberman's excuse for terminating [Ard] was a pretext.[110]" A second sexual discrimination lawsuit was filed separately by Gregory Anderson, who was fired in 2014, alleging the company's performance management system was arbitrary and unfair, making it the second sexism lawsuit Yahoo and Mayer faced in 2016.[111][112][113]
Yahoo, AOL, and HuffPost were then combined under a new company, Oath Inc., later called Verizon Media.[128][129] The parts of the original Yahoo! Inc. not purchased by Verizon were renamed Altaba and liquidated in 2020.[130]
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts,[145][146] one of the largest breaches reported to date.[147] The United States indicted four men, including two employees of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack.[148][149] On December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account information, including security questions, to at least one billion accounts.[150] The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to forge HTTP cookies.[151][152]
On October 3, 2017, the company stated that all 3 billion of its user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft.[153][154][155][156][157]
In November 2009, Yahoo was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending a DMCA notice to whistleblower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures on obtaining personal data of Yahoo's subscribers.[99]
In September 2011, after some concerns over censorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.[100][101][102]
On May 20, 2013, Flickr, Yahoo!'s image and video hosting website, unveiled a redesigned layout and additional features, including one terabyte of free storage for all users, seamless photostream, cover photo and updated Android App.[103][104] The redesigned layout fills the page with dynamically re-sized photos and, on the home page, displays recent comments on photos. Tech Radar described the new style Flickr as representing a "sea change" in its purpose.[105] Many users criticized the changes, and the site's help forum received thousands of negative comments.[106]
In January 2014, a large scale malware attack was discovered by Fox IT in the Netherlands that was targeted at Java and dated back to December 30, 2013, especially affecting users in Romania, France, and the UK and being delivered to 300,000 Yahoo! users per hour when they discovered it. Yahoo! was criticized for not providing any public guidance on the number of users affected or advice on what the affected users should do.[107][108]
In October 2016, Scott Ard, a prominent editorial director fired from Yahoo in 2015, filed a lawsuit accusing Mayer of leading a sexist campaign to purge male employees. Ard, a male employee, stated "Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of [an employee performance-rating system] to accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo's male employees". In the suit, Ard claimed that, prior to his firing, he had received "fully satisfactory" performance reviews since starting at the company in 2011 as head of editorial programming for Yahoo's home page, yet he was relieved of his role that was given to a woman who had been recently hired by Megan Lieberman, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo News.[109][110] The lawsuit states:"Liberman stated that she was terminating [Ard] because she had not received a requested breakdown of [his] duties. [Ard] had already provided that very information as requested, however, and reminded Liberman that he had done so. Liberman's excuse for terminating [Ard] was a pretext.[110]" A second sexual discrimination lawsuit was filed separately by Gregory Anderson, who was fired in 2014, alleging the company's performance management system was arbitrary and unfair, making it the second sexism lawsuit Yahoo and Mayer faced in 2016.[111][112][113]
Yahoo, AOL, and HuffPost were then combined under a new company, Oath Inc., later called Verizon Media.[128][129] The parts of the original Yahoo! Inc. not purchased by Verizon were renamed Altaba and liquidated in 2020.[130]
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts,[145][146] one of the largest breaches reported to date.[147] The United States indicted four men, including two employees of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack.[148][149] On December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account information, including security questions, to at least one billion accounts.[150] The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to forge HTTP cookies.[151][152]
