Yahoo Knows How to Gain Market Share

Thursday, May 18th, 2006 by Andy Beal

Yahoo Knows How to Gain Market Share

The WSJ, has an interesting snippet from Yahoo’s analyst event. Could it be their secret weapon for gaining market share from Google?

The company is betting on social media, especially their Yahoo Answers initiative.

In Taiwan, where Yahoo first brought out an Answers-like service, Yahoo was able to take market share from rival Google, Mr. Weiner said. Yahoo’s market share reached 65%, and Google’s fell to 30% in April, compared with 50% for Yahoo and 45% for Google in December 2004, he said.

You know what, makes sense when you think about it. Give people the opportunity to contribute to the quality of search results and they’ll take pride in them. Which means they’ll likely stay loyal to a particular search engine, because they know they’ve had input. The only problem for Yahoo is that Google has learnt this secret too, hence Google Co-op being launched.

Save & Share

Similar Stories in: General | Forward: Email This Post

1 comment on “Yahoo Knows How to Gain Market Share”

Lady Says:

October 15th, 2008 at 9:13 am

While I agree that having something like Yahoo! Answers puts ownership and in the long run loyalty from end users, it puts information quality at risk. Who moderates the answers in these question and answer forums? Or rather, how frequent do the answers get moderated?

I know some friends of mine who get a kick out of answering these questions in an absurd, non-helpful, “just playin’” manner. And while, I sometimes laugh at their witty comments/answers in the site, I can’t help but feel a little doubtful about the factuality and quality of these kinds of open forums.

Lady’s last blog post..China to relax property restrictions