Yahoo’s ship is sinking. To keep it afloat, they’re tossing all the dead weight — and there’s a lot — of their unprofitable websites. We even got early word of which sites and services would be dropped when a leaked image gave us insider information, directly from a presentation for Yahoo employees. However, while Yahoo feels the pain of loss as these long-time projects are abandoned, start-ups have new cause to celebrate.
As reported by Mashable, this centers around one key site seeing its final sunset: Delicious. Delicious, one of Yahoo’s more popular yet least profitable sites, is certainly not in line with the company’s overall scheme. Their plan, they stated, was a sale. But considering how easy social bookmarking sites are to replicate, and Delicious’s proven track record of making no money, that seems unlikely. Further, insiders working on the Delicious project have told us that selling the site would be made even more complex thanks to the deep integration of proprietary, Yahoo-specific technologies.
Whether they wind up selling or bailing, Delicious users caught wind of the news, and their immediate response was to abandon ship as well. These users exported their social bookmarking data, and went in droves to competing start-ups like YourVersion, Histori.us, Pinboard.in, and Springpad, all of which saw spikes in traffic after the leaked announcement of Delicious’s upcoming fate. These aren’t small figures, either. According to Jeff Janer, the CEO of Springpad, there have been “more than two million bookmarks migrated from Delicious” in the two weeks after the information leak. The winner, however, may be Pinboard.in. According to the Alexa traffic statistics, Pinboard.in saw a full 720% traffic increase in the final two weeks of December.
While the need to abandon this property may be tragic for Yahoo, competitors stand to gain immensely by acting as the fail safe for the flagging, former search engine champion.
