The digital world is a fickle little thing. We’ve all seen the overnight sensation apps and the viral videos and memes of the moment the accidental YouTube superstars. On the Internet, fame is a prize that you don’t have to work for. Like the fastest connection speeds, it’s something that happens in an instant. And as swiftly as that fame can arrive, it can disappear just as suddenly.
The demise of Internet giant Yahoo has been a long time coming. The eventual fall from grace has been brewing for years and was first noticed when the rest of the connected world was shifting and pivoting and disrupting while it stayed the same.
Yahoo is a pioneer of the digital revolution. Some may argue that it started it all. And those pioneering efforts have generally been successful. At some point, we all have had Yahoo email addresses (which are probably embarrassing ones because we didn’t know any better), Yahoo Messenger accounts and have used the portal to search and look the news up. It was everything we needed. But it was just that – something we needed.
Back then, that was enough. The thing is that Yahoo was created when no one knew what the Internet was about. Obviously, in creating something totally new, you have to base it on something that already exists. Simply, Yahoo was just the physical world taken online.
In the mid-1990s, people just consumed information and accepted whatever mass media fed them with. To be validated, something had to go through the mainstream filter and be passed on from a voice of authority to the masses. Yahoo largely followed that pattern and it was a winning formula because that’s what the market called for.
What Yahoo neglected to consider was the emergence of new markets – the millennials and the digital natives who soon found out that the Internet could be so much more than just a source. We realized that it could be a place to explore, experiment, play, mingle, exhaust and dump our own ideas on. Yahoo’s Internet was just the tip of the iceberg. We, as a culture, discovered its other potentials.
Being folks who are never satisfied, we were never content with having just what we needed. We had to have more. That’s where everything else on the Internet comes in. If only Yahoo gave us all our wants, then maybe we would’ve stuck with it. But it didn’t. It insisted that we were consumers, that it was the creator – because remember, it still believed that it had the formula that worked.
As other online services allowed all of us to be creators, Yahoo remained a creator as well. It refused to acknowledge that consumers could do its job. As an aggregator, it only picked up from sources that were traditionally credible (or those that it deemed credible). Everybody else – meaning you and me – are there simply to observe and absorb.
But see, we wanted to be heard. We weren’t just going to be observers and absorbers. We had to contribute, we had to participate, we had to engage, and we had to collaborate. Social networking sites and content-uploading services allowed us that. When Yahoo realized that, it was too little too late – we‘ve all moved on and forgotten that it ever existed.
Its resistance to embrace mobile proves the same point. For as long as it could, Yahoo harnessed the power of the desktop, seemingly incapable of wrapping its mind around the fact that the next logical step from the desk to the lap was to inside the pocket.
These days, the once force to be reckoned with is in the news because of its downfall. Verizon purchased its core business for a little under $5 billion, or a tiny fraction of its market value at its peak. It’s a miserable amount in terms of tech acquisitions, especially for a company that prominent.
It’s the end of an era, that’s for sure, and hopefully down the line, we remember Yahoo for all the good things it gave us, and not how it tragically fell from grace.
