This entry was written on October 26th, 2009 in memory of GeoCities, another Yahoo failure.

As I listen to a new Yahoo radio advertisement, I am reminded of a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza’s girlfriend is breaking up with him using the old “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse. George explodes with, “Don’t give me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ excuse. I invented the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ excuse. If it’s anyone, it’s me.” Despite the fact that Yahoo is projected to spend over $100 million on the “Yahoo It’s Y!ou” Campaign, I feel like I need to tell you, Yahoo, that it’s not me, it’s Y!ou and here’s why:

1. As a whole you haven’t evolved since the late 90s. The portal model died with the dotcom burst when we started finding new ways to search the internet with Lycos, Altavista, AlltheWeb, and GoTo/Overture.

2. You have been and continue to prostitute the algorithmic results with your use of SSP, admitting that you don’t care about what we as users see as relevant, but really only care about who is willing to pay you the most.

3. We thought you were starting to understand when you bought Overture and started investing in your search technology, but then Google came along. You were so afraid of losing that you tried to copy Google with Panama, but messed it up and lost the only thing that really made you unique.

4. Microsoft, knowing that both of you were better off together, offered to give you lots of money to get married. You turned them down and, in doing so, decided you could make your business better by yourself.

5. You didn’t make your business better.

6. Once Microsoft withdrew their proposal, you fired a bunch of people and Panama was failing, so you decided you’d just give up on search and sold your search business to Bing/Microsoft.

7. You created a new portal page where nothing really changed except for what links I could customize, essentially being a watered down iGoogle page.

8. You decided to spend all of your money telling us we should love you, and actually think that we do love you, rather than actually fixing your business. In so doing, you really tell us that if we don’t like Yahoo, it’s because it’s our site.

After we’ve been through all of this together, I thought things would get better, but I see you can’t change. So I’m breaking up with you. It’s Y!ou, not me.

Tags: geocities, marketing, yahoo

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.