Yahoo! Philippines

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

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo reached Turkey the way it reached most of Europe, as an email address and not much else. Plenty of people I knew had a yahoo.com address in the early 2000s and used it for signups and for anything they did not want going to their real one. The chatting happened on MSN. The home page, the thing that opened when the browser opened, belonged to Turkish portals here and never once belonged to Yahoo.

The Philippines was the other case entirely. Yahoo Philippines was established on 25 April 2006 and became the sort of default the company had already stopped being in its own country. A Yahoo address was simply the address, and Yahoo Messenger stayed how people talked well past the point where the rest of the world had moved on. The portal itself was where a large share of the population read the news. For a stretch in the late 2000s the Philippines was arguably a better Yahoo market than the United States.

That is worth stating plainly because the story usually gets told the other way round, as Yahoo losing everywhere at once to Google. It did not. It lost the markets that had alternatives and kept the ones where it had arrived first and become a habit. Then it spent about a decade deciding what to do with the markets it had kept, and what it decided, twice, was less.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a country's home page was worth ~

For most of its life the Philippine edition was a real operation with real people in it, including a newsroom producing local coverage rather than a translation layer over American wire copy. That is the expensive way to run a country portal and it is the only way that earns the default position, because a home page has to give a reader something they cannot get by typing a different address.

On Wednesday 25 February 2015 the editorial staff were told the team was being dissolved, closing out roughly six years of the newsroom's existence. Kate de los Reyes, who held both the country manager and country editor roles, went with it. Yahoo framed it as part of a restructuring running across Asia and Europe, and what followed locally was curated content in place of reporting.

~ it died twice ~

About three months later the rest of it went. On 2 June 2015 ph.yahoo.com and the topic sites underneath it were redirected to Yahoo Singapore, folding the country into a regional home page that was not written for it. That looked final and was reported as final at the time.

Then in May 2017 it came back, with a redesigned home page and a refreshed news section. A country edition revived two years after its newsroom was abolished is a strange object, and what it amounted to was the shell of the thing that had worked, restored because the traffic had not gone anywhere even after the substance did. It ran like that for five more years.

The second ending came in October 2022, when Yahoo restructured its Southeast Asian editorial operation and stopped publishing localized content for the Philippines and Indonesia. Seven journalists in Singapore lost their jobs in the same round. No announcement was made to Philippine readers that anybody has been able to point to, and today ph.yahoo.com quietly resolves to the Singapore home page again.

~ the long tail ~

Yahoo the company still exists and still owns a great deal of traffic, so nothing here is a bankruptcy story. It is a story about what happens to a market that stayed loyal long after it had reasons not to. The Philippines kept Yahoo for years past the point where keeping it was the obvious choice, and the reward for that was a newsroom closed out from under it and a local edition removed years later without notice.

A dead startup gets a shutdown post and a date. This got neither, twice. That is the ordinary way large companies leave a country, and it is worth a stone precisely because it was ordinary.

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