.Yahoo Quietly Shutters Yahoo Pets [grin]
With no notice Yahoo quietly started directing pets.yahoo.com users to a subsection of their women’s vertical Shine.
[Excuse me while I have a David vs. Goliath moment.]
The demise of pets.yahoo.com comes as no surprise, the once popular and lucrative profitable pets.yahoo.com has literally been on cruise control for the last 3 years, without even a dedicated project manager over seeing it. The site homepage rarely changed content, the forums contained unmoderated profanities and nefarious scam-style listings could be seem in the message boards.
It was also a ghost ship on the enterprise-side. Trying to find someone who had the authority to discuss partnerships or licensing deals was like trying to speak to a human at a HMO provider. And we worked over a dozen inside channels. The running joke among their sales people was that thanks to falling page views and a long-term multi-million flat-fee contract with a single advertiser signed in the bubble era, Yahoo Pets was getting ridiculously high CPMs (> $100) for years and had to do almost nothing for it. And it was also understood that eventually the ghost ship would run aground.
Moving it from a dying huge portal to a nascent but growing vertical is the practical move, but now pets on yahoo will be relegated to being a sub-vertical of a vertical which is about the same as being a subsection of a portal. The Shine ad sales team – which I’m sure is quite solid – simply won’t be able to put the the same effort into a sub-vertical. The uniques and page views just won’t add up and neither will the commissions. Likewise, the product manager overseeing the pets sub-vertical won’t have the opportunity to obsess over content like the Shine homepage manager will.
Pure unadulterated passion is what advertisers are looking for and why no pet advertiser ever doubts they’ll reach their target audience with us. It’s what leads them to golden households and lifelong customers. And anything less offers significantly less. You can argue that getting the extended reach of a greater women’s network will increase advertisers and lift impressions, but that’s not what we’re seeing with the integration of NBC’s Petside.com into iVillage.com last year.
It’s a shame really. Yahoo, for all it’s management failings, is one of the truly great people-positive brands. There’s so much they could have done with pets.yahoo.com if they hadn’t been floundering the last 3 years. But what’s worse is there’s so much we could have done with it for them (such as increasing revenue 10x) but they couldn’t even consider that because they had to switch over to focusing only on whale-sized deals. But Yahoo and Shine, we’re still here and will always be open to making great music together. Meanwhile we’ll be doing what the small furry mammals did when the dinosaurs became extinct and exploit the opportunity with all our abilities … after all, behaving like small furry mammals is in our nature.
[...] Dogster’s reply to the closing of pets.yahoo.com. Good stuff. It’s a shame really. Yahoo, for all it’s management failings, is one of the truly great people-positive brands. There’s so much they could have done with pets.yahoo.com if they hadn’t been floundering the last 3 years. But what’s worse is there’s so much we could have done with it for them (such as increasing revenue 10x) but they couldn’t even consider that because they had to switch over to focusing only on whale-sized deals. But Yahoo and Shince, we’re still here and will always be open to making great music together. Meanwhile we’ll be doing what the small furry mammals did when the dinosaurs became extinct and exploit the opportunity with all our abilities … after all, behaving like small furry mammals is in our nature. [...]
Internally, Yahoo! Pets was seen as a punchline. It was an unspoken but known fact that the only reason why Yahoo! Pets still existed is because the sales team were tight with folks at Purina. They, in effect, kept the site in existence when a lot of people in the company wanted it gone years earlier.
[...] theoretically, so the Dogster-YahooPets_RIP bizdev post by Dogster founder is a classic : “It was also a ghost ship on the enterprise-side. Trying to find someone who had the authority to discuss partnerships or licensing deals was like [...]
They could just have made a great community there… I guess it’s not easy to try to be everything to everyone.
In the pets niche, small & passionate players are the ones who will be successful; big companies making crappy portals won’t go too far alone.
Sigh.
I’m the original engineer that built that site. I miss the Pet Horoscopes (Yep, horoscopes written from the view of the pet as in “Stay off the couch today Muffin” or “Today is full of lots of interesting smells.”), as well as a few easter eggs like a slightly modified post about “Why does my dog eat grass” where I did a global search and replace of “eat” for “smoke”.
For the most part, Pets existed because Purina had a lot of money and wanted a web site on Yahoo. (Hey, there were a LOT of companies that felt that way.) A lot of dedication from a lot of folks made that site really work, but sadly, it never really met the sort of traffic and revenue goals that some high level folks unreasonably set for it.
Ted – agree with your core assertion that categories like pets are best addressed by entrepreneurs who can deliver “pure unadulterated passion.”
But, to be clear, Yahoo Pets was never popular nor lucrative.
I worked briefly on Y! Pets in 2003. It was a bunch of pet classifieds with a $500k/yr Purina graphical deal laid on top. Pets never even got to $1 million/yr for Yahoo.
Yahoo Pets is DOA now, but it’s been dead for 6+ years, and never had much happening even in its pre-2003 peak. So it’s not so much a demise as it is a story of a category that never materialized for Yahoo (much like Classifieds and Auctions overall).
enjoying reading @tedr’s dancing on the grave of a goliath competitor post http://is.gd/hzsO some good one liners in there
waxy: Dogster’s Ted Rheingold on the quiet death of Yahoo! Pets http://tinyurl.com/aa6udv
Dogster’s Ted Rheingold on the quiet death of Yahoo! Pets:
Andy Baio : Dogster’s Ted Rheingold on the quiet de.. http://tinyurl.com/aa6udv
@AfY Thx, quality information! I had heard it was a higher annual payment. I amended my use of the term lucrative.
(Though in some circles, $500k rev w/o a single headcount is pretty good ;)
Nonetheless, we certainly understand the very reasonable reasons why Yahoo! chose to focus on properties that were already orders of magnitude bigger.
RT @adamostrow Dogster reports Yahoo Pets shuttered, users redirected to Yahoo’s women’s vertical, Shine http://bit.ly/3tLCaf
[...] out by May. Also, it apparently moves away from the the pets-community vertical and startup rival Dogster rejoices. Google product manager to be Obama’s “director of citizen participation” [...]
[...] Read more from the original source: bYahoo/b Quietly Shutters bYahoo/b Pets [grin] » Dogster Inc. Company Blog [...]
Yahoo shutters Yahoo Pets http://is.gd/hzsO
Yahoo closes pets vertical, dogster rejoices http://tinyurl.com/aa6udv
Retweet @jowyang: Yahoo closes pets vertical, dogster rejoices http://tinyurl.com/aa6udv
Great analysis and community comments. Pointing some of the traffic firehose to an ad-driven, second-rate site will always lose to the vertical business that understands its users.
[...] Yahoo Pets: Dogster founder Ted Rheingold digs into the demise of Yahoo Pets, the portal for pet-lovers Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) launched in 2001; noting [...]
[...] Yahoo Quietly Shutters Yahoo Pets [grin], blog.dogster.com [...]
[...] out by May. Also, it apparently moves away from the the pets-community vertical and startup rival Dogster rejoices. Google product manager to be Obama’s “director of citizen participation” [...]