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Yahoo! Property Breakdown and Sum of the Parts
July 03, 2008
Rumors are circulating about another attempt by Microsoft to acquire part of Yahoo!. The latest rumors suggest that Microsoft will try to buy Yahoo! Search with a media company (i.e. Time Warner or News Corp) absorbing the rest of the business. To put the value of the search business in context, I wanted to share a breakdown of traffic to the top 20 Yahoo! properties. Also, I've compared clickstream traffic to these top Yahoo! Properties from Google and Yahoo! to show that these Yahoo! properties would not be lost without search.
The following table shows the top 20 Yahoo! Properties based on share of US Internet visits among websites in the custom category of 20 websites.
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.
The following chart shows the share of upstream visits to each of those 20 properties from search.yahoo.com and www.google.com. Most properties receive more traffic from Google than from Yahoo! Search. In particular, Yahoo! Answers received 49% of its US visits from Google last month, compared to 20% from Yahoo! Search. Flickr received 13% of visits from Google compared with 5% from Yahoo! Search. The exceptions are Yahoo! Image Search and Maps, likely because of Google's shortcuts to its own properties in these verticals, and the Yahoo! account pages. Even Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo.com received more traffic from Google than Yahoo! Search. .
Whether Yahoo! is better kept whole or split up I can't say. What I can say is that the parts of Yahoo! are quite valuable and wouldn't necessarily be lost without the search engine.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:44 AM
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Comments
If you have the time, it would be fascinating to see the same analysis for Microsoft properties -- i.e. what percent of traffic to the various parts of MSN and Live comes from Microsoft search versus Google.
Posted by G. Davies | July 3, 2008 01:12 PM
You're kidding, right?
Is a Ford more valuable if you break up the engine from the chassis?
Whether google sends more traffic to a yahoo property than yahoo search is fairly irrelevant. The strength of the Yahoo brand, it's ability to refer traffic (even if it's less than google) certainly makes any Yahoo property worth more as part of the whole than a piece of it.
Yahoo still has the ability to send massive amount of traffic where they choose.
Posted by peter caputa | July 3, 2008 02:40 PM
Excellent - thanks for this analysis Heather. Yahoo dodged the Microsoft Bullet that would have kept them intact it now looks like they may wind up getting split as part of a more complicated deal that will use metrics like this to value the different pieces.
Posted by Joe Hunkins | July 3, 2008 03:50 PM
hrm, I really doubt some of this... yahoo is ranked 2 by compete.com....
I'd do a comparison across alexa/compete, quantcast, etc...?
disclaimer: i didn't totally read all this just glanced at the numbers quick
Posted by Matt Kaufman | July 4, 2008 04:30 AM
Does this include downstream traffic from all Yahoo! properties. EG. Is the Yahoo! image search subdomain included within search.yahoo.com. If it isn't, this may explain the anomaly identified by Dave.
Posted by Richard Hartigan | July 4, 2008 07:05 AM
Very pretty pictures but where does the data come from? I have to admit that Hitwise' search market metrics leave me very disappointed. I'd like to see Hitwise discuss its methodologies and source more openly.
Posted by Michael Martinez | July 4, 2008 11:38 AM
Would be interesting if you could do a similar analysis of Google properties for comparison.
Posted by Steve Follmer | July 7, 2008 03:03 AM
Thanks for the comments. I'll put together some similar charts for MSN and Google this week. Also, to answer Dave and Richard's questions, yes, we are looking just at traffic from search.yahoo.com and www.google.com. The analysis didn't include traffic from either Yahoo! or Google Images.
I checked our data and last month, 20% of visits to Flickr came from images.search.yahoo.com compared to only 3% from images.google.com.
Hope this helps reconcile this for you.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | July 7, 2008 06:40 AM
Since this came out I've realized that most people I've talked to overlook that the Yahoo home page, Yahoo Search, and all of the other sites on the Yahoo Network are all separate properties. Yahoo Search shouldn't be confused with the Yahoo Network.
Most importantly:
www.yahoo.com = Home Page
search.yahoo.com = Search property
That said, it is normal for many sites (I'd argue most) to see more traffic coming from Google Search than from Yahoo Search since Google has a higher market share (more people search there, which could potentially mean more referrals from there).
Of course we'd see exceptions when shortcuts are involved, or if any SEM/PPC is involved (I assume PPC is discluded from this data).
Posted by laura lippay | July 7, 2008 04:59 PM
I have to disagree with your analysis of traffic to flickr. I am a flickr user and through use of the flickr stats service that flickr provides, I see far more referrals to my photostream coming from Yahoo (Image) Search than I do from any Google search. Other than that, thanks for the numbers.
Posted by Dave | July 3, 2008 11:03 AM