Yahoo's Lack of Logged-In Users Has Hurt Its Ad Business

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and CFO Ken Goldman Credit: Marissa Mayer's Tumblr page

When GroupM Global Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman first met Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, she had finished a speech touting Yahoo as the place that, at that time, hundreds of millions of people a month go to do things like searching the web, checking email and catching up on news. That's a lot of people. But Mr. Norman was interested in how regularly those people are performing these so-called "daily habits" on Yahoo's properties.

"Whilst I understand there are a bazillion Yahoo Mail accounts, I'm interested to know how many are active, how many are people's principal email accounts," Mr. Norman said.
At its core, Mr. Norman's question is whether Yahoo is still a utility to a lot of people. Yahoo grew to its size because it was one of the original gateways to the internet. For many people who used its search engine, email service and news portal, Yahoo was the internet. And for advertisers Yahoo became an easy way to reach people on the internet. But Yahoo's utilities have been surpassed by similar products from Google and Facebook -- Google search; Gmail and Facebook Messenger; and the Facebook news feed, respectively -- and those companies have eaten into Yahoo's share of people's online attention.
Comparing ComScore's measurement of Yahoo's U.S. traffic in February 2013, the earliest available figures from comScore, against October 2015, overall traffic to Yahoo's sites has stagnated. And while search traffic has increased -- thanks in part to Yahoo's deal to be the default search engine on Mozilla's Firefox web browser -- the number of unique visitors to its home page and email service have declined, the latter historically being considered a big traffic driver for the former.