Hitwise Intelligence’s VP for Research, Heather Hopkins made an interesting analysis of Yahoo! online properties based on some Hitwise data. Hopkins noted that of the top 20 Yahoo properties for June 2008 based on internet visits, Yahoo! Search was just a mere third trailing behind Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo main portal. Yahoo Search got a mere 12% share of the total number of visitors going to Yahoo’s properties for the said month. (See chart)
She then said that:
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.
Adding some more interesting analysis, Hopkins noticed that in another set of data, most of the properties that has significant number of page visits got their share of the traffic from Google’s search engine rather than from Yahoo Search.
What these two findings clearly show is that:
- Yahoo! Search is not performing well for Yahoo in terms of eyeballs or page visits
- Yahoo! Search is not even helping Yahoo’s other properties drive traffic into the Yahoo site.
Conclusion?
