Yahoo! Inc. | Acquisitions and Further Expansion: 1997–98
Acquisitions and Further Expansion: 1997–98
As Yahoo! became a certifiable household brand name, the company began striving to further satisfy the needs of its users. Following the trend set by online service companies such as AOL, Yahoo! added services and features such as chat areas, Yellow Pages, online shopping, and news. The company also added a feature called "My Yahoo!," which was a personalized front page for regular users that displayed information tailored to each user's interests. The company also teamed up with Visa to create an Internet shopping mall (an idea that was later aborted), with publisher Ziff-Davis to create "Yahoo! Internet Life" (an online and print magazine which never came to fruition), and with Netscape to develop a topic-based Internet navigation service to be used with the Netscape Communicator browser software.
By 1997, Internet surfers were using Yahoo! to view approximately 65 million pages of electronic data each day. That year, Yahoo! acquired online White Pages provider Four11 for $95 million. The purchase gave Yahoo! access to Four11's e-mail capabilities, which when integrated into Yahoo!'s offerings allowed the company to provide its users with free e-mail (Yahoo! Mail). By mid-1998, over 40 million people were logging on to Yahoo! each month, 12 million of whom had become registered Yahoo! e-mail users. To put those numbers into perspective, one can consider that at that time, only 30 million people were tuning in to network-leader NBC's top-rated show ER each week, and the number of Yahoo! e-mail users was comparable to that of online service giant AOL.
In July 1998, Yahoo! received a $250 million investment from Japan's Softbank Corporation, increasing Softbank's share of the company to approximately 31 percent. Yahoo!'s market valuation at that time was $6.9 billion, which was much higher than that of most other media companies. As an emerging media company, Yahoo! began to move into the Internet access market that year through the launch of Yahoo! Online. To do so, the company initially formed a partnership with MCI WorldCom, but the arrangement deteriorated later that year. Subsequently, Yahoo! crafted a deal with communications giant AT&T to provide Internet access through AT&T's WorldNet service.
Also in 1998, Yahoo! replaced Digital Equipment's Alta Vista with California-based search engine specialist Inktomi as the supplier of Yahoo!'s search engine. Yahoo! then purchased Viaweb, a producer of Internet software programs. The acquisition resulted in the posting of a one-time $44 million charge in 1998. Yahoo! planned to use Viaweb's software to start a new service, which would allow its users to set up their own Web sites for the purpose of buying and selling goods online.
In October 1998, Yahoo! purchased Yoyodyne Entertainment for 280,664 shares of Yahoo! common stock. Yoyodyne added its permission-based direct marketing capabilities to Yahoo!, which also obtained the company's database of consumers, valuable demographic information, and other Yoyodyne assets. Prior to the acquisition, much of Yoyodyne's direct marketing was done through online games and sweepstakes at Internet sites such as EZSpree.com, GetRichClick.com, EZVenture.com, and EZWheels.com. Yahoo! announced that while those four sites would remain intact after the integration of Yoyodyne into Yahoo!, the former company's overall brand would be phased out.
By the end of the year, Yahoo!'s user traffic had increased considerably since 1997, with Web surfers viewing approximately 95 million pages of information through Yahoo! each day, a huge increase from the previous year's average.