Flashback Websites: Yahoo.com

Yahoo.com was launched before Google.com and is now the 5th highest ranking website in the world, but do you still use Yahoo? I still actively use my Yahoo Mail account & pay $20 annually for it… Why? I really don’t know I suppose I don’t like change and so many people know my yahoo email address it would be a pain to change it. I do however use Gmail for any new websites that I setup if I am not using my own hosted email but to be fair most of the time I use my own hosted email servers.

Anyway more about Yahoo!

Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995, Yahoo has changed massively over the years at one point being a major player in PPC advertising and having direct parking feeds with some of the largest players in the domain business but more recently people have spoken about Yahoo and there shares in Alibaba founded by Jack Ma –

Jerry Yang met Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 1997 during Yang’s first trip to China. Ma, a government-employed tour guide and former English teacher, gave Yang a tour of the Great Wall of China. The two hit it off and discussed the growth of the Web, and Ma created Alibaba several months later. A 1997 photo of Yang and Ma at the Great Wall still hangs on the wall in Alibaba’s Hangzhou office.

In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million. In 2012, Yahoo! sold a portion of its stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion. The company made an additional $9.4 billion in Alibaba’s 2014 IPO. Eric Jackson, the founder of hedge fund Ironfire Capital, called Yahoo!’s investment in Alibaba “the best investment an American company has ever made in China,” and stated, “Jerry deserves enormous credit for that.”

Lets have a look at Yahoo! from where it was in 1996 until now in 2015 – A Massive difference in how it looks.

Yahoo.com 1996