Yahoo! has had some problems in the past period of time. A few months ago they fired the chief executive Carol Bartz, and it seems that they now found a replacement. They hired Scott Thompson, the president of PayPal, as the new chief executive. PayPal is an online payment service owned by eBay.
Mr. Thomson, who is 54, joins a company which is in a very difficult position. Yahoo! is losing its momentum against the other great companies in the online world, such as Facebook and Google. More than 700 million people go on the website each month, but even so, it still has problems. The website is the leader in online finances, sports, and news, and it will report a net profit of more than $1 billion in 2011. Even so, Facebook managed to surpass Yahoo in online display advertising in the United States of America for the first time. Microsoft made an agreement with Yahoo and as a result, it handles the website’s search advertising.
Yahoo Hires New Chief Executive (Source: seomoz.org)
The online ad market increased with more than 20 percent last year, but even so, Yahoo’s share dropped with 11 percent in the same year. Mr. Bartz, was hired to take care of the company, but he failed to do so, so he was fired. Now, Mr. Thompson has this task, and it will be interesting to see the way in which he will handle the situation. There are many experts who believe that he will have a very difficult job, because the Internet businesses are very hard to solve. Once they have problems, they continue on the same path.
Roy J. Bostock, the chairman of Yahoo’s board stated that Thompson is the best person for the job, because he managed to make PayPal in a very successful business. According to the analysts, Mr. Thompson will have to establish the website’s strategy first. Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research stated that in the past period of time Yahoo focused on investing in technology and crating original media content. Google did the opposite thing, and Google was more successful. The experts believe that Mr. Thompson will want to make more money from the advertisements.
Yahoo Hires New Chief Executive (Source: cdn.sitetrail.com)
Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology research firm stated that the most important thing is to make money from the content you have, and not to create original content. She stated that the company can make lots of money if it plays its card right.
