James Best Jr./The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo has been one of the most-visited sites on the Internet since its glory days as a Web portal. Yet as the rest of the Internet moved on to social networks and mobile devices, Yahoo has failed to keep up.
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That became painfully clear Tuesday when Yahoo’s board abruptly fired its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz. She focused on bolstering Yahoo’s online media and original reporting, but neglected to develop the new social networking tools, video services or mobile apps that people now prefer to use. In that way, the tale of Yahoo’s misfortunes is not just one of management woes, but a vivid illustration of the transition from Web sites that publish professional content to a new digital world dominated by mobile phones and sites where the users are the content creators.
Yahoo’s problems are shared with another Internet pioneer, AOL. Both astutely capitalized on the first huge shift in how people read — moving online from paper — but they failed to follow Internet users and advertisers to cellphone screens and social networks. Both companies have tried to become media companies. Meanwhile, the next generation of companies, like Google and Facebook, have happily satisfied the demand for information and entertainment — not by creating content but by building mobile and social networking services that attract users and, increasingly, valuable advertisers.
“Yahoo hangs on to the pieces that made it a giant years ago,” said Shar VanBoskirk, a digital marketing analyst at Forrester Research. “It assumes people will come to its Web site, and what users are looking for now is a much more syndicated experience that allows them to go to mobile devices and co-create content.”
As the way people use the Internet changed, she said, Yahoo and AOL “hit the wall and didn’t continue to evolve as the rest of the market did.” Yahoo’s sites, like its home page, e-mail service and sites for finance and entertainment, still have a huge audience — 177.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore — second only to Google’s but more than Facebook’s. But while Yahoo’s traffic has flattened, both Google and Facebook are growing in popularity. And people spend about half as much time on Yahoo as they do on Facebook.
Advertisers are chasing what they say is more profitable prey — users of smartphones, video sites and social networks, and the companies that cater to them. Yahoo has always led in one of the most important corners of the advertising marketing: display ads, those that show images and video. But Facebook and Google are closing in on Yahoo, in large part because they can offer advertisers more personal information about users.
Yahoo’s slice of the display advertising pie has shrunk for three years in a row, according to eMarketer, a digital-marketing research firm. Last year, its share of display ads was 14.4 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for Facebook and 8.6 percent for Google. But this year, Facebook will surge ahead of Yahoo with 17.7 percent to Yahoo’s 13.6 percent, eMarketer predicts. And by next year, Google will have nearly caught up to Yahoo, too, with 12.3 percent of display ads compared with 12.5 percent at Yahoo and 19.4 percent at Facebook.
“Yahoo still has an enormous amount of traffic,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “But more and more ad buys are being made in a more targeted way.” Advertisers are attracted to information that Facebook has about a user’s friends or Google has about a user’s search queries, he said.
Mr. Hallerman compared Yahoo and its audience to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1960s, like Life and Look. Those publications were done in by the shift among advertisers to magazines aimed at specific groups like celebrity news or golf. “The idea of a portal trying to be everything to everybody is outdated,” he said.
Advertising executives also criticized Yahoo for the shortcomings of its advertising technology as well as executive turnover that meant that every few months, ad agencies had to teach a new Yahoo executive about their accounts. “When you look at Yahoo, there’s a lot of distractions,” said Christian Juhl, president of the Western region at Razorfish, a digital ad agency owned by the Publicis Groupe.
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