Yahoo, which was once on everyone’s lips, drove himself out of the market with his own hands, without needing anyone. The company, which underestimates the concept of success, has served its biggest business on a silver platter to its biggest rival, even though it has not yet gone bankrupt.

The largest in recent memory From the story of failure that started with success When people of the new generation look at this content, which will make them nostalgic for those who know Yahoo well, they will ask: “what is this?” They can look at it. Let’s explain right away.

When we first met the Internet, Yahoo meant the Internet.

When it comes to the Internet, the first thing that comes to mind is Yahoo, just like Google is now. Especially in the late nineties Witness to both its birth and collapse in the early 2000s The next generation will better understand what we mean. But first let’s start with how it is installed.

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford University. It wasn’t called Yahoo when it was founded; It was ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. When the site attracted millions of visitors in the first months of its founding, they decided to change the name to Yahoo. It’s actually a radical change.

Since another brand was using the Yahoo name, they chose to put an exclamation point at the end.

Two years later it was opened to the public. The real adventure starts here. GeoCities was the first place you went to if you wanted to do something on the Internet in the late 1990s. You can create your own site from here. Yahoo bought this site. The project, which is very popular, became even more famous at Yahoo.

But Yahoo, This is exactly where he planted the seeds of failure, he could not control the process and the project slowly disappeared.

Let’s go to the year 2000, when every company was investing in the Internet.

During this period, investments that we could not calculate were floating through the air. At that time, everyone’s interest in the Internet increased, and during these periods Yahoo was number one and at the top. It traded at $500 per share; but this was the beginning of the collapse.

One of the biggest mistakes Yahoo made was presenting itself not as a search engine, but as a “search engine.”portal‘ was his definition. Google developed He wanted to sell the PageRank algorithm to Yahoo, but Yahoo didn’t accept it. Because he regarded the search engine as a part of the portal, he made an agreement with Google: he started using Google as a search engine, which was a bull’s eye.

With this agreement in 2000, everyone started hearing about Google.

First Google was used through Yahoo, and then searches were only done through Google. This is a great success for Google. It was a complete accident for Yahoo And after a while he began to continue the journey alone. But it was too late, because Google grew exponentially.

2001 was a dark year for all websites; Those that had been opened were closed one by one. Yahoo also had its share in this situation and the value of its share fell from 500 to 8 dollars.

At that time, a system was created called GoTo, which was actually based on the logic of Google Ads.

You added a search box to your site from here and made money when ads were clicked. At that time, Google did not yet publish such advertisements. Here’s what we know GoTo changes its name to Overture and bought Altavista.com, also a major search engine at the time, for $140 million. Once again, Yahoo did not remain silent about Overture, which grew through the acquisition of the group to which Fast Search and AlltheWeb.com belong, and bought this company in 2003 for $ 1.63 million.

Once again, Yahoo gained momentum by acquiring many companies. He terminated his agreement with Google in 2004.

The acquisition of Flickr and Tumblr, which left their mark on the period, was a huge development.

In 2005, as users gradually joined social media and produced content, Flickr was a kind of Instagram model of the time. Users could upload photos and comment on others’ photos. He was literally the shining star of his time. Yahoo was quick to seize this opportunity and Bought Flickr for $25 million. Wait, it didn’t stop there!

Yahoo failed to exploit Flickr, which continued to grow independently until 2011. Another company bought Flickr. Even though things weren’t going so well, they still had a strong user base. Microsoft these periods Yahoo with a significant offer ($44.6 million) He wanted to buy it, but as you can guess, Yahoo couldn’t be smart about it either and declined. Like Melek Subaşı “You 3 billion 750 million, you billion, what have you done with this money?“It seems we hear you responding.

The era of Google’s first female engineer, Marissa Mayer, has begun.

with a strong past Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo in 2012. This period was relatively better and more active for Yahoo. Because they announced that they had bought Tumblr, the most popular social site of that period. Based on previous experience, although everyone thought Yahoo would not be able to hold its own here, Tumblr did not intervene, but only provided background support to the site.

Although Mayer made many breakthroughs during his time as CEO, he couldn’t save Yahoo alone. In 2017, Yahoo was unable to continue after several attempts Verizon acquired it in a $4.8 billion deal.

However, Verizon offloaded Yahoo to Apollo Group for about $5 billion, almost at a loss. With this sale to Apollo Group, the companies associated with Yahoo Buzzfeed, Huffpost, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch and Engadget Many media organizations such as have been acquired by Apollo Group.

So where did Yahoo go wrong?

Yahoo, as we said at the beginning, in the early years of the Internet Strongly focused on the ‘portal’ approach, which aimed to ensure that all services were accessible from a single point. However, this approach resulted in it becoming a large and complex structure. Yahoo has gained an important place by acquiring many successful projects and running successful businesses within its own structure. However, due to the problems posed by this complex structure, it could not achieve the necessary transformation in the projects.

Yahoo had its own special dynamics, and the inability to adapt these dynamics to mobile platforms meant that a great opportunity was missed. Furthermore, the company ignored the importance of team spirit. This led to management shortcomings as projects were delegated to non-experts.

All purchased projects were actually successful, but… management problems This prevented them from fully realizing their potential. If these projects could be managed independently, we would see a very different picture today.