Yahoo

It is the most popular Internet site based on traffic, with visits from about 500 million unique users every month.

Nearly 90% of Yahoo!'s revenues come from the online advertising business, which has quickly become dominated by google (GOOG). The two online advertising giants generated nearly the same revenue and operating margin rate in 2004, but Google has outstripped its main rival and in 2006, generated 65% more revenue ($10.6 billion) than Yahoo! ($6.4 billion) with an operating margin over twice as high (33% versus 15%). Yet, despite a pronounced limp behind Google in the U.S. Internet advertising market, Yahoo! has a strong foothold in the developing East Asian market, which could bode well for the future.

History

Founded as a web directory by two Stanford graduates in 1994, Yahoo! has since become a dominant player in the field of Internet services.

How they make money

Yahoo! primarily generates business from advertising, which accounted for 88% of total revenue in 2006. Yahoo! derives the remainder of its revenue from fees for premium services like music downloads and extra storage.

news from Tech Crunch

When comScore releases its monthly lists of top performing sites there’s one result that has always surprised me, and that’s seeing “Yahoo sites” ahead of “Google sites.” Google remains the dominant leader in search, but when it comes to traffic across all properties Yahoo remains on top. In November 2007 Yahoo sites tracked 136 million unique visitors in the United States compared to Google’s 131.5 million, numbers that have continued to narrow over the years but ones for which Yahoo still rules.

Breaking down Yahoo’s performance isn’t an easy task; comScore tracks 1084 different Yahoo subsites. As we noted in the Christmas Day email post Yahoo remains the clear leader in online email, but growth there remains low at around 3%. Across the board Yahoo’s growth figures are all over the place. Here’s the top performers for the year based on percentage growth:

And the worst performers based on percentage of traffic lost, but not including sites that comScore no longer records traffic for and excluding traffic to Yahoo Photos (that traffic is now going to Flickr):

It’s hard to know which numbers to pick when looking at Yahoo’s performance over 2007. This the top ten sites in Yahoo’s network by traffic:

The key to fixing Yahoo’s woes in 2007 won’t be finding more traffic and providing compelling content, it should be 100% focused on better monetizing it.