The Yahoo! Story

...rarely have I seen a graphic or story where that adjective applied quite so well. Thanks for sharing, Aaron.

I couple of years ago I was trying to help out a buddy out and get him an Oveture feed so he could put it on his high traffic finance site. He is based in the US and we're in the UK.

Yahoo was happy to provide us with one and we made them hundreds of thousands in clicks, my buddies site had 10 times the traffic but we needed a US feed. They would've made hundreds of thousands if not millions had they provided a feed to him.

We begged them, called them, emailed every person we knew. Got other people with big accounts to ask them. They were just not interested and didn't know where to begin.

I think this general "it's not my job" and "I don't make and sales commission so I won't bother helping" attitude is systemic in a largely demotivated company and has largely contributed to their demise. Apart from what appears to be terrible management, right from the top.

Respectfully Yahoo!, you deserve to die. Survival of the fittest and you're an overweight, stupid baboon.

Yeah...and the weird part with Yahoo! was is they were stingy with their feed toward people with clean search-driven traffic sources, while they allowed sub-feed licensing to the people who were doing arbitrage stuff. There is even one well known webmaster who worked the Yahoo! feed who had "clickbot" in his nickname. The net result of such scam click activities was that many Yahoo! keywords only sold for something like 1/3rd or 1/4th of what Google could get for them.

As you said, that company deserves to fail.