Yahoo China

» see cn.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

China's internet turned into a separate internet during the years i was at university, and Yahoo China is the artifact from just before that was obvious to everyone. In 1999 the assumption was still that the global brands would arrive and win the way they had everywhere else.

The portal opened on 24 September 1999 with the ordinary Yahoo furniture of news and mail. It did not win. Local competitors understood the market and the regulator better, and by 2003 Yahoo's answer was to buy its way in: $120 million for 3721, a company whose main product was a browser add-on that let people type Chinese words into the address bar instead of domain names. The add-on was famous for being difficult to remove, which was not an accident and did the brand no favors.

Two years later Yahoo stopped trying. In October 2005 it paid a billion dollars for a large minority stake in Alibaba and handed Yahoo China over as part of the same transaction. The name stayed on the door. Everything behind the door now belonged to Jack Ma's company, which had its own priorities and no particular reason to grow somebody else's portal.

There is one part of the record that has to be stated plainly. In 2005 the journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years for leaking state secrets, and the evidence used against him included account information supplied by Yahoo's Hong Kong operation. Yahoo argued it had followed local law and was hammered for it in a congressional hearing, then settled with the families of jailed dissidents in 2007. Shi Tao was released early, in 2013, the same year the brand he had used was shut down.

i had a Yahoo account in those years like everybody else, but Yahoo China was never a Chinese edition of the thing i used. It was a separate company wearing the same wordmark, run by owners in a market whose rules i have only ever read about.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

The wind-down was done piece by piece so that nobody would have to announce it. The music service went in January 2013. Mail closed on 19 August 2013, with accounts portable to Alibaba's own Alimail until the end of 2014, and Wikipedia's estimate is that fewer than a million people were still using it. The portal itself stopped in early September and its address was pointed at a news site run by Taobao.

The stated reason was a 2012 agreement between Yahoo and Alibaba, the deal in which Alibaba bought back half of Yahoo's stake. Once the shareholding was being unwound there was no commercial logic left in licensing the name to a portal nobody used. Yahoo's remaining services in the country were withdrawn entirely in November 2021.

~ the next chapter ~

3721's founder Zhou Hongyi came to Yahoo China with the acquisition, ran it, disagreed with head office, and left in 2005. The next year he founded Qihoo 360, which became one of the largest security and browser companies in the country and eventually a search engine of its own. Yahoo paid $120 million for a toolbar and accidentally financed a competitor that outlived it by decades.

The rest is a lesson about brands. Yahoo's name kept operating in China for eight years after Yahoo stopped making any decisions there. To a user typing the address, nothing announced that difference.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »