Ask HN: Is Yahoo Relevant?

I just visited Walmart after about 2 years, just to see what they're all about. What I found was a bunch of cheap stuff, none of which I would ever buy. I tried their fountain drinks and the results were reasonable, but not superior to Target. They also had lots of rack space devoted to tampons and other "feminine hygiene" products, which being a man, I never use. What am I not seeing here?

According to QuantCast (https://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com?country=US), Yahoo still has 74 million users monthly. That's a pretty big number and puts them in the top 10 of US Internet Traffic. People still use them for news, search, and other web properties such as Flickr. Rest assured, there is money to be made from this kind of traffic, and Marissa Mayer is "trimming the fat", aka reducing costs, which generates more profits.

Is it relevant to me? No, not really. But then again, neither is Snapchat or Facebook. So, what do I know?

Wall Street seems to think Marissa Mayer's doing something right. (Their stock is up over 300% over the last 3 years). I haven't looked over their recent quarterly reports, maybe those would hold some key info: https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm

I personally don't like what they've been doing to their web portals (massive graphics, tabloid-style coverage, etc.) but that stuff isn't that important in the long run. They've been doing a lot of right things in mobile with a great weather app and news digest app that I use daily and have been reviewed very well by users. If you told me two years ago I would be spending time with Yahoo-powered apps on my phone multiple times I day I would have laughed.

About two years ago, I was working as the part time CTO for a blog where the owners would write stories for Yahoo Sports that were featured on the Yahoo homepage. The stories contained links to related stories on his blog. Those links would routinely drive 250,000 unique pageviews in under two hours.

Yahoo News is very popular here in the Philippines. Most Filipinos use Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Auction and Yahoo Search(powered by Google, not Bing) are very popular websites in Japan. These are just examples of why Yahoo is still relevant.

I think it really depends on how you use it.

I have a Yahoo mail account but I rarely login to it on the website. Instead I use their IMAP server with a desktop app.

YaWho?