Yahoocomis Maximus Visibilitor :the information medium
which became an economic medium
Family : portal
Sub-family : general portal
Ancestry : research directory
The press has been talking about the success of Yahoo!
for a long time, without identifying the hold that the
company has on electronic commerce. The world-renowned
success story began in 1994 when Jerry Yang discovered
the Web and invented with David Filo 'Jerry and David's
guide to the World Wide Web'. In February 1995, the site
was already attracting 80,000 visitors per day. Netscape
then offered them four Silicon graphic stations and three
Pentiums linked to a high-bandwidth network (T3) in exchange
for an advertising campaign. Having refused buyout offers
from Prodigy, AOL and a partnership with Microsoft, the
students contacted Sequoia Capital and obtained an investment
loan of a million dollars. A year later, the company as
able to raise several hundred million dollars as a result
of its introduction to NASDAQ.
Yahoo's success is simple : Internet is a jungle
of information and Yahoo! was conceived as a reference
tool to find one's way through that jungle. Thanks to
its huge financial resources, it has succeeded in maintaining
its market lead and diversifying. Besides the original
directory, it now offers a news service, yellow pages,
financial information and hundreds of other free services,
as well as a huge online store, which will probably enable
the company to climb out of the red, where it is at present
; its advertising plan is insufficient to balance the
books. Four years after its creation, the company, which
attracts a million visitors daily and lists 700,000 sites,
is one of the Internet's most frequently used entry points.
It is thus one of the best-placed businesses in the world.
The original job of the company was to look for
information. But it quickly evolved towards the creation
of content. The main source of finance being advertising,
the only way to increase its revenue was to use this element
to encourage visitors to spend longer at the site. The
content of the site is continuing to develop, mostly in
partnership with specialist publishers.
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