Course Project
Lewis Beets
ITT Tech Online
BU344 Marketing and the Internet
Professor Jeff Pennycuff
April 27, 2013

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is widely known for its web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website. It is one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo! websites every month. Yahoo! itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages."
Yahoo is a global internet services company that started off as just a small personal web site. Jerry Yang and David Filo, both university graduates took this small piece of the web and turned it into a world-wide sensation. It now racks up a colossal 3.4 billion page views per day and is one of the most visited web sites in the world. This article is a look on what has made this company what it is today; its business model.
To take an early view of this company, one can come to realize that it was actually bravery and uniqueness that contributed to most of Yahoo's young business plan. The owners had the veracity and guts to take their web site to the next level, from a small web site list to a well known brand name and beyond. Most of the foundations for Yahoo were laid before the Dot Com Boom, meaning very few people had ever made a venture like this one. Yahoo's business model was about stepping up and taking risk. The founders of this great company strove to make their web site unique, a feature-full piece of the internet that would consolidate the regular web user's preferences into one place. Yahoo was about having a home on the internet.
Soon Yahoo grew, and soon after the Dot Com Boom they were making share-price history, particularly in Japan. Things were going exceptionally well for this company, but as competition entered the fray, the young business minds behind the behemoth realized that their business model had to change. It was no longer unique in the sense that web sites like MSN and Google were bumping shoulders. Yahoo was in danger to losing their appeal. That's when they realized that their primary focus from there on in would have to be diversification.
Yahoo wanted to be about having everything you needed on the internet in one place. As technology developed people were doing more and more of their regular business online. Yahoo had to diversify and fast. Yahoo primarily wanted people to be able to find whatever they needed on this web site, so they soon started acquiring search engines. They later made a deal with Google and made a partnership with the largest search engine on the internet. This of course wasn't enough to fit their business model of diversification. Yahoo moved into a pact with Verizon and launched their own internet DSL service. They introduced communication with Yahoo Messenger. They allowed people to check their e-mail with Yahoo Webmail. Soon enough they had everything from games to TV listings to personals.
Diversification was going swimmingly for Yahoo. They soon controlled everything that the average person needed on the internet. They were finally becoming the internet super-power they are today. However, it was quickly realized that their business model had to change again. Diversification was reaching its limit, so Yahoo began to focus on growth and expansion the focus of its business model today. The company began to acquire companies such as Flickr, expanding their online empire.
This is where we see Yahoo today. An online sensation that won't stop, its growth is now its primary focus, and who knows where their developing business model will take them next. The name of my company would be Triptych. Triptych