"Yahoo: A Company in Crisis"?

Yahoos business revenues are gained through advertising, and are calculated by the number of searches conducted, and by the number of clicks on advertisements.

Yahoos actual revenue has been growing pretty nicely, from around 1bn in 2002 to 6bn in 2006, but its market share is tanking, its shareprice is tanking and more recently users have been leaving it in droves.

I think that Yahoos attitude on YA probably mirrors its attitude elsewhere, which is to say that what it cares about is herding users onto its services through "content" and hoping we click the adverts and engage the search engine.

The problem is that Yahoo's search engine is naff. I don't think I have used it once in the entire time I have been on answers, or rather I did use it once or twice and found that it screwed up my ability to post and answer, and the results were godawful anyway. Instead, I open google in a new window. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing so.

Yahoo has also made some huge high profile blunders which include betraying Chinese democracy dissidents to torture at the hands of the Chinese government in breach of international law, and lying to Congress about it before Yahoo's founder, Jerry Yang was hauled in front of congress to account for those lies and his actions.

Yahoo is a supremely arrogant company, it acts on the belief that the volume of users it attracts are purely a reflection on the services at our disposal, and cares little or nothing for customer retention and loyalty. It has not learned that even on the internet, reputations are affected by corporate behaviour.

People who lose long term email accounts as a consequence of receiving violations on Yahoo Answers are seething with anger, and rightly so. We are all at a party where we love the food and hate the host is how it seems to me.

Some great ideas completely ruined by the despotic halfwit who invited us to the free meal.

I think Microsoft are entirely foolish to seek to buy out Yahoo. The could obtain what is left of it market share by duplicating its services and putting in good customer service to support them, but then Microsoft has trouble understanding customer service too. Maybe that's the match. The difference is, Yahoo isn't a monopoly, it's a floundering behemoth which is trying to win the search wars without doing the one thing that would really give it a chance. Developing a good search engine.

It's arrogance and attitude fail it as a social networking site. It's poor search functionality fails it in competition with google.

All it has managed to come up with to prevent Microsofts buyout is a demand for more money.

Steve Ballmer is right. Microsoft should oust the Yahoo board and come in with a lower offer. What will Yahoo be worth in a year anyway?

Yahoo shareholders greatest fear is probably that Yahoo remains independent.

I use about three email accounts (all for different purposes) and all of them process substantial amounts of email.

One of those accounts was with Yahoo! from 1997 until late last year.

When Y!A set up I accessed it via my longstanding Yahoo! email account - until I got the predictable account suspension for highly questionable reasons.

I suddenly had to re-evaluate the worth of my Yahoo! email account - over a few weeks I stopped using it except as a spamcatcher.

Y!A was supposed to attract new custom to Yahoo! - but it is being so badly run that it is driving established custom away.

This company has lost the plot. They'd be in crisis even if the US economy was on an upturn.

Yes, the deletions policy is monstrous. For Yahoo to claim that it is "moderated by the community" is hypocritical hockum. It puts too much power in the hands of the irresponsible report mnkeys.

Yahoo has been losing people to google. Honestly, Yahoo!answers is the only reason I still have a yahoo account, oh, that and using yahoo email accounts as spam catchers for sites that require your email to join.

In 2000, I set upan email address with yahoo, and only recently (nov 2007) I found 'yahoo answers'. I remember getting to about 200 points and got my first email 'violation' notice. Not long after my whole email address was suspended, with over 20 emails in it that i had not read, i had had that email address for 7 years and tried to ask yahoo if i could transfer them to another account, but they didn't respond.

If they go bust, it is because of these policies, quite frankly, feck em.

My yahoo account has been deleted recently after 10 years of existence and I have no clue why. I do most of my business transactions via email so Yahoo mail no more.

Possibly.

But lets be honest - Google is better across the board. And they have access to so many potential customers via their search engine etc.

It will be a shame if Yahoo fold, because the internet is full of so many monopolies already. Ebay/Amazon are great sites, but they stamp ruthlessly on competition the minute it appears....

Yahoo is no longer my homepage as a result of their notorious deletions policy, so there may be an indirect relationship.

Yahoo is losing everything because of the failure of its founder and principal owner, as well as his overpaid board of executives. They have failed to listen to users for years, and now are staring great losses in the face and are still in denial. Only supreme arrogance could do this, and Jerry Yang and his bunch have that in great abundance.

Yahoo offers many services, however, the primary use for the site is that of a search engine, and google is the better search engine.