Yahoo History

Yahoo! began in 1994 as a database for finding Internet resources.

The "yahoo.com" domain was created on January 18, 1995.

When venture capital dollars were offered in February 1995, they couldn't resist.

March 1995: Yahoo! is incorporated.

Yahoo Corp. was formed in April 1995.

“The whole experience feels sacred to me,” says Mimi Lyons, one of the original surfers, who joined in November 1995 and stayed for seven years. “It’s something that just magically happened.

In early 1995, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications, invited Yang and Filo to move Yahoo! to the larger computer system housed at Netscape.

Yahoo! generated its first revenues in 1995 by selling advertising space on its pages.

In April 1996 when Yahoo! had its Initial Public Offering it was able to raise nearly $33 million by selling 2.6 million shares at approximately $13 per share.

To build the fledgling brand, in April 1996 the company released the "Do You Yahoo!?" marketing campaign.

That spring, Yahoo! used almost its entire advertising budget for 1996 to run its first national-scale ad campaign on television.

Geographically themed sites were introduced for members in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC. International expansion was also a priority in 1996.

At the beginning of 1996 Yahoo! provided links to about 100,000 sites.

By 1997 advertising of Internet services had grown dramatically.

Yahoo! and Ziff-Davis International Media Group partnered to launch Yahoo! Europe in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, with other countries to follow in 1997.

By 1997 Yahoo! was posting profitable quarterly financial results, including $210,000 in the first quarter and $610,000 in the second quarter.

PC Magazine named Yahoo! the best Web search engine of 1997, citing its news-searching capabilities and extensively cross-referenced directory.

According to analyst Paul Noglows of Hambrecht & Quist Inc. in the September 7, 1998 edition of Business Week,”Yahoo has the potential to emerge as the first pure Internet giant.” Its ability to do so in the computer-dependent environment of the 21st century seemed certain.

Himelstein, Linda, Heather Green, Richard Siklos, and Catherine Yang, “Yahoo!; The Company, the Strategy, the Stock,” Business Week, September 7, 1998.

1998: The company establishes Internet guides in Chinese and Spanish and teams with AT&T's WorldNet Service to provide Internet access.

By 1998 Yahoo!'s growth and success had moved it into the domain of a new set of competitors.

A rapid rise in its stock price gave Yahoo! a market value of $4.3 billion in early 1998—by far the highest of any Internet company.

During 1998 Yahoo! developed plans for becoming a portal and developing additional revenue streams from commerce and other sources.

Yahoo! continued to operate at a profit in 1998.

New services launched in 1998 included Yahoo! Small Business and Yahoo! Clubs.

By early 1998, Yahoo had added email, shopping, classifieds, personals, games, travel, weather, maps, people search, celebrity chats, a kid-oriented version called Yahooligans, and an online magazine.

By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine.

Hodges, Jane. "Winning and Keeping Web Surfers." Fortune, May 24, 1999.

In 1999 Yahoo! enjoyed strong revenue growth and profitability due to its global operations.

Among the many new services introduced during 1999 on Yahoo! were auctions, Yahoo! Radio, Corporate My Yahoo!, electronic bill paying, and Yahoo! Everywhere.

June 28 2000: Yahoo! acquires eGroups.

boardman, bruce. "yahoo—185 million users served." network computing, 30 october 2000.

Though not among the Internet's most popular dating sites, eHarmony, introduced in 2000, offered a matchmaking formula that distinguished it from most of Yahoo! Personals' competitors, and a correspondingly higher subscription fee made it one of the more lucrative of competing services.

Yahoo! enjoyed strong revenue growth during the first half of 2000.

New services launched in 2000 included the Yahoo! B2B Marketplace, a site designed to help companies find products and suppliers by serving as a portal to other vertical trading communities.

Hansell, Saul. "Red Face for the Internet's Blue Chip." The New York Times, March 11, 2001.

April 17 2001: Terry Semel announced as the new Yahoo!

A flurry of new joint ventures also promised continuing growth for Yahoo! In November 2001, the company teamed with SBC Communications to offer co-branded DSL and Dial services.

2001: The company acquires HotJobs.

Yahoo! Personals introduced a subscription model into its service in 2001.

According to a mid-2001 study by Jupiter Media Metrix, Yahoo! was one of four Internet sites that accounted for more than half of all the time spent online by Internet users in the United States.

With more than 192 million registered users as of mid-2001, Yahoo! had more people using its site than any other company.

barlas, pete. "analysts cheer yahoo's efforts to end reliance on advertising." investor's business daily, 10 april 2002.

December 2002: Yahoo! starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine

In 2002, however, the company posted a net income of $42.8 million.

They have maintained a course of adding new revenue, such as subscription-based services, but the revenues from these services is materializing very gradually." Expectations for the company are positive for 2002 and beyond.

Black Rocket lost the Yahoo! account in August 2003, and the company's new ad agency developed a marketing campaign anchored by the tagline "Life engine."

In November 2003, Yahoo set the Guinness World Record for Largest Simultaneous Yodel.

By the time Yahoo realized its mistake–and acquired Overture, the company that invented paid search advertising, for $1.6 billion in 2003–Google was already steaming ahead.

As of March 2004, the Yahoo! network of properties received some 2.4 billion page views per day.

March 1 2004: Yahoo! However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.

March 25 2004: Yahoo! acquires the European shopping search engine Kelkoo.

December 15 2004: Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.

March 2 2005 Yahoo! To celebrate this, it gives free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users.

April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_announces_Yahoo_support

May 26, 2005 Yahoo! announces its new PhotoMail service

As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo's "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005.citation needed

September 7, 2005. supplies information to People's Republic of China which then jails reporter Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4221538.stm

December 9, 2005 Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.

The "Live Billboard Dating Campaign" won a Gold EFFIE Award in 2005.

You could even argue that Alibaba, China’s massive online marketplace, might not be a $160 billion company today without Yahoo’s $1 billion investment in 2005.

That came in July 2006, when Yahoo tried to buy Facebook, then a college-oriented network with roughly 7 million members, for $1.1 billion.

August 31, 2006 Yahoo! Research Berkeley, California in association with the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007.

Today’s Squarespace and WordPress let you build sites that are a thousand times more attractive, but the web lost some of its soul when Yahoo killed GeoCities in 2009.

On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced a cut of 2,000 jobs or about 14 percent of its 14,100 workers.

In 2012 Mayer became chief executive officer and president of Yahoo! Inc., a global Internet-services company and one of Google’s largest competitors.

On May 13, 2012, Yahoo issued a press release stating that Thompson was no longer with the company, and would immediately be replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group.

In 2012, it earned profits of $3.94 billion against a revenue of $5 billion.

In early 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, rumors began to spread about looming layoffs.

The cut was expected to save around $375 million annually after the layoffs were completed at end of 2012.

On May 19, 2013, the Yahoo board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging site Tumblr.

The company also announced plans to open a San Francisco office in July 2013.

On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquired Rockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products were terminated.

On November 21, 2014, it was announced that Yahoo had acquired Cooliris.

It did go up to $36.04 in the mid afternoon of December 2, 2015, perhaps on news that the board of directors was meeting to decide on the future of Mayer, whether to sell the struggling internet business, and whether to continue with the spinoff of its stake in China's Alibaba e-commerce site.

On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced that it had agreed to purchase Yahoo's core internet business for $4.83 billion.

However, this effort as well as others failed to turn around Yahoo!, and in 2016 it was announced that the company’s core assets, notably its Internet operations, were being sold to Verizon Communications.

On June 8, 2017, Yahoo shareholders approved the company's sale of some of its Internet assets to Verizon for $4.48 billion.