03
2008
Yahoo! Property Breakdown and Sum of the Parts
Rumors are circulating about another attempt by Microsoft to acquire part of Yahoo!. The latest rumors suggest that Microsoft will try to buy Yahoo! Search with a media company (i.e. Time Warner or News Corp) absorbing the rest of the business. To put the value of the search business in context, I wanted to share a breakdown of traffic to the top 20 Yahoo! properties. Also, I’ve compared clickstream traffic to these top Yahoo! Properties from Google and Yahoo! to show that these Yahoo! properties would not be lost without search.
The following table shows the top 20 Yahoo! Properties based on share of US Internet visits among websites in the custom category of 20 websites.
I’ll admit, I went into this analysis thinking that the data would show that Yahoo! was worth more together – I thought that the sum of the whole would be greater than the parts. However after looking more closely at the data, I’m not sure that is necessarily true.
The following chart shows the share of upstream visits to each of those 20 properties from search.yahoo.com and www.google.com. Most properties receive more traffic from Google than from Yahoo! Search. In particular, Yahoo! Answers received 49% of its US visits from Google last month, compared to 20% from Yahoo! Search. Flickr received 13% of visits from Google compared with 5% from Yahoo! Search. The exceptions are Yahoo! Image Search and Maps, likely because of Google’s shortcuts to its own properties in these verticals, and the Yahoo! account pages. Even Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo.com received more traffic from Google than Yahoo! Search. .
Whether Yahoo! is better kept whole or split up I can’t say. What I can say is that the parts of Yahoo! are quite valuable and wouldn’t necessarily be lost without the search engine.
I have to disagree with your analysis of traffic to flickr. I am a flickr user and through use of the flickr stats service that flickr provides, I see far more referrals to my photostream coming from Yahoo (Image) Search than I do from any Google search. Other than that, thanks for the numbers.
can we see the same analysis but for AOL???
If you have the time, it would be fascinating to see the same analysis for Microsoft properties — i.e. what percent of traffic to the various parts of MSN and Live comes from Microsoft search versus Google.
Yahoo’s top U.S. Web sites get traffic help from Google search
A fresh look at Yahoo's search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether
You’re kidding, right?
Is a Ford more valuable if you break up the engine from the chassis?
Whether google sends more traffic to a yahoo property than yahoo search is fairly irrelevant. The strength of the Yahoo brand, it’s ability to refer traffic (even if it’s less than google) certainly makes any Yahoo property worth more as part of the whole than a piece of it.
Yahoo still has the ability to send massive amount of traffic where they choose.
Excellent – thanks for this analysis Heather. Yahoo dodged the Microsoft Bullet that would have kept them intact it now looks like they may wind up getting split as part of a more complicated deal that will use metrics like this to value the different pieces.
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo’s sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo’s sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo’s properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo’s other properties probably wouldn’t be too affected by this, as they get m…
hrm, I really doubt some of this… yahoo is ranked 2 by compete.com….
I’d do a comparison across alexa/compete, quantcast, etc…?
disclaimer: i didn’t totally read all this just glanced at the numbers quick
Does this include downstream traffic from all Yahoo! properties. EG. Is the Yahoo! image search subdomain included within search.yahoo.com. If it isn’t, this may explain the anomaly identified by Dave.
Very pretty pictures but where does the data come from? I have to admit that Hitwise’ search market metrics leave me very disappointed. I’d like to see Hitwise discuss its methodologies and source more openly.
Weekly Wrapup, 30 June – 4 July 2008
This Week’s Highlights From RWW
Would be interesting if you could do a similar analysis of Google properties for comparison.
Weekly Wrapup, 30 June – 4 July 2008
Last Week’s Highlights From RWW
Thanks for the comments. I’ll put together some similar charts for MSN and Google this week. Also, to answer Dave and Richard’s questions, yes, we are looking just at traffic from search.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com. The analysis didn’t include traffic from either Yahoo! or Google Images.
I checked our data and last month, 20% of visits to Flickr came from images.search.yahoo.com compared to only 3% from images.google.com.
Hope this helps reconcile this for you.
Thanks, Heather
Since this came out I’ve realized that most people I’ve talked to overlook that the Yahoo home page, Yahoo Search, and all of the other sites on the Yahoo Network are all separate properties. Yahoo Search shouldn’t be confused with the Yahoo Network.
Most importantly:
http://www.yahoo.com = Home Page
search.yahoo.com = Search property
That said, it is normal for many sites (I’d argue most) to see more traffic coming from Google Search than from Yahoo Search since Google has a higher market share (more people search there, which could potentially mean more referrals from there).
Of course we’d see exceptions when shortcuts are involved, or if any SEM/PPC is involved (I assume PPC is discluded from this data).