In The Economist’s business blog, “Schumpeter”, their article, Yahoo! Searching for a Future, talks about Yahoo!’s declining shares in the social media market, as well as their declining advertisement business. Projections predict that Yahoo! will end up with just over 13% of the market in 2011, while Facebookâs share will leap to more than 16%, up from around 12% in 2010.
Furthermore, as a consumer myself, who avidly uses the Internet and social media outlets, I have a noticeable decline in the prominence of Yahoo! as a search engine or social media outlet, which therefore decreases its overall attractiveness for advertisements. For example, when people wish to look something up, they would predominantly use Google, for which there has even been a official term coined, “googling”, the act of using Google to search for something.
As seen in the chart above, not only is Yahoo! declining as a search engine, but as a social media outlet as well. Even for a business, if they wished to connect with their customers, they would most probably turn towards advertising outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, which would have a much larger impact on their market than advertising on Yahoo!.
To prevent itself from being bought out by more successful media companies, Yahoo! will have to amp up its innovation to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook and re-capture consumer interest.