It is not long ago, that Yahoo ruled the world, well the search world anyhow. One often forgets that to a certain extent, without Yahoo, we may not have seen the rise (and rise and rise) of Google, and it is thus sad to see the current state of the Yahoo search product. Whilst it continues to try and elolve its online advertising product set it is the Yahoo Mail product that continues to gain traction, something according to an article on ZDNet that hasn’t been lost on new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz who is quoted as saying
“Yahoo Mail is becoming increasingly critical to the company. Yahoo Mail has a billion emails pass through its servers every day and it’s critical that the company enables better photo sharing and other features”
This is further reinforced by some recent data from Hitwise. Yahoo Mail accounts for around 36.71% of visits to Yahoo properties, followed by the portal homepage and quite significantly further back Yahoo Search. Other Yahoo properties such as Yahoo News and My Yahoo! were in a close knit group back around 3%.
Whats more the Yahoo Mail continues to see growth – 3%, whilst not as big as GMail (88%) still significantly better than that of Windows Live Mail which saw a loss of over 20%. Whilst search continues to struggle against strong competition from MSN – which I must say have a number of interesting new products looming – it is good to see some significant growth from the Yahoo camp.
