back to article Yahoo! parties! like! it's! 1999! with! retro! billboard! revival!

If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail, again Perenially-in-crisis web portal Yahoo! has decided to revive a tactic from its glory days in an attempt to create new glory days. The company has decided to “reclaim” what it's calling “the iconic billboard along San Francisco’s stretch of Interstate 80” that it hired in the …

  1. Florida1920
    Joke

    “It’s good to be back.“

    Did they go away? I hadn't noticed.

    1. wolfetone Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: “It’s good to be back.“

      In fairness all the TV I watch is based on VHS recordings of specific shows. The adverts have always been catchy though. "YaaaaahOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo".

      Man, best advert ever. I hope they never change it.

      1. Anonymous Custard
        Headmaster

        Re: “It’s good to be back.“

        And in this day and age of movie and TV "reboots" of shows from yesteryear (rather than bothing with anything like creativity or invention), it's almost in keeping with the trend...

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "feel free to let us know if you require or appreciate such illumination"

    That'll be a bit difficult to do given that their home page makes zero mention of where to go to do so.

    1. JetSetJim
      Holmes

      Re: "feel free to let us know if you require or appreciate such illumination"

      It would be here, on 6th Street, overlooking I-80 from the South

      1. Iain

        Re: "feel free to let us know if you require or appreciate such illumination"

        Here's a retro version from 2009, featuring the launch of Fantasy Football, soon to meet its demise.

  3. Mark 85

    A billboard....????

    I guess they (marketing? PR?) hasn't figured out that the WWW goes far beyond the I-80 and that SF is not the center of the universe? So exactly how is this news and how will it affect the rest of us?

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: A billboard....????

      This is a story on a website about a billboard advertising a website that does advertising

      That is so meta - it's almost not fscking stupid

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A billboard....????

      As a company, not just PR.

      They never managed to get a single non-USA (actually non-Silly Valley) team working on anything but mechanical turk jobs. This is _EXACTLY_ why Google and Microsoft have been successful in elbowing them out. They are Global companies. Yahoo - is just a small silly valley which never ever got past the "if it is outside the valley it is not happening" mentality.

  4. jake Silver badge

    "surprise and delight"? Really?

    Everybody who enjoys the blight of billboards, please stand up and make yourselves known.

  5. NanoMeter

    The good old days

    Retro has always been in, unlike fads.

  6. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

    maybe they should make products that work

    It used to be that their search results included so many scam companies, more than google did. I just tried it now, I typed "yahoo technical support" into the yahoo.co.uk search field. It yields NO natural search results and one ad - an ad for changing your home page to yahoo.

    Seriously though, I know only one person who uses yahoo (they pay for a yahoo email service which goes wrong fairly regularly). When you think of search, who the hell thinks of yahoo? What's it even for?

    1. Joey M0usepad Silver badge

      Re: maybe they should make products that work

      I didnt know they still did a search engine! Which was their problem back in the day, they , and all other search providers wanted to be "portals" and filled their fron page with so much shit no one could find the search box. Then came google , with their design...

      1. Gritzwally Philbin

        Re: maybe they should make products that work

        http://search.yahoo.com.

        Works just fine.

    2. GrumpenKraut

      Re: maybe they should make products that work

      > What's it even for?

      It's targeted at people who are into having their eyeballs raped in a retro way.

    3. Gritzwally Philbin

      Re: maybe they should make products that work

      > What's it even for?

      Getting results from flickr, and from Groups - the TWO properties it's tried, and failed, to kill.

      Seriously, the idea that it's more than those two services is laughable.. they're the only ones making money and of course, the only ones driven by users content.. Funny how that goes, eh? (then again I use both on a regular basis and my group is now 11 years old..)

  7. Mage Silver badge
    Trollface

    Retro

    Bring back Geocities.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: Retro

      They could easily have kept Geocities going.

      Around the time they announced the closedown (about six years ago), I figured that the amount of storage space required to it could probably have been bought for a few hundred quid in 2009. Why? Because most of the sites were created around the turn of the millennium, when websites were much, *much* smaller (no YouTube), and free webspace like Geocities would likely have been in the low megabytes (which most people wouldn't have used all of).

      If they'd put it in maintenance/archive mode (i.e. no updates, allowed existing users to remove their sites but nothing more) and slapped ads on the existing content- as they did anyway- it'd probably have easily outweighed the cost of the minimal staffing required.

      My suspicions then were that Geocities was so financially negligible on the scale of things by then that it was being killed off for accounting reasons, or for political ones (i.e. some management stuffed shirt wanted to be seen doing something that looked more significant than it was).

      IIRC something I read later on sort of confirmed this suspicion.

      My ballpark guess regarding Geocities' storage requirements was also roughly correct; I came across something that confirmed it would have been several terabytes in size. Even in 2009 that was utterly, utterly negligible compared to what YouTube alone would have used.

      Yeah, I realise that a lot of Geocities was teen fluff and very of its time, but there was still no good reason to kill it off. If they'd been worried about it making Yahoo look like a 90s has-been, they could have removed their name from it anyway. It's not like killing it helped Yahoo in that respect, since they've had that "90s has-been" air about them ever since Google stole their lunch not long after the dotcom bust anyway.

    2. Captain DaFt

      Re: Retro

      "Bring back Geocities."

      In a way, they did. They bought Tumblr and tweaked it to be "Geocities 2.0".

  8. cmannett85

    What does Yahoo! actually do anymore? The only times I'm reminded of the company's existence is when El Reg is mocking it...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yahoo's sole reason to exist is so that The Register can put exclamation points in italics after! every! word! in! the! headline!

    2. Thecowking

      Yahoo own Flickr

      Which is the only reason I still have a Yahoo account, because Flickr's not a terrible service, though I suspect it will soon succumb to the general malaise at Yahoo with the random changes they keep making to try and make it into a social network.

    3. DropBear

      "What does Yahoo! actually do anymore?"

      Well, for one, provides the (literally) only free email service that a) isn't Google b) isn't a shady Russian portal and c) can be accessed directly through a mail client and not just through some webmail portal (although inexplicably they seem to... erm... not advertise this feature)*.

      *- Yes, I'm aware of GMX, they just happen to boot people out of their own accounts without any appeal or justification; so no they don't count - there's something wrong with their definition of the word "service".

      1. Mage Silver badge

        provides the (literally) only free email service

        I don't use hotmail/Outlook (what ejit named a Cloud email service the same as the ancient evil email client?). But I assumed it was free, and that a) isn't Google b) isn't a shady Russian portal and c) can be accessed directly through a mail client and not just through some webmail portal?

        I'm sure I once had a hotmail account as well as Yahoo and gmail. These days I use my own domains which is "technically" free as I paid for it all to do websites not email.

        I'm not a shady Russian portal and I use POP3 / SMTP with them

  9. Admiral Grace Hopper

    Last night

    Last night I dreamed of the shriek of a dial-up modem handshake. Quite gave me a turn, so it did.

  10. naive

    The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

    Being a very happy yahoo email user from 1999 on, it is sometimes annoying to see this. Yahoo has very good uptimes, in those 16 years i experienced one (!) outage, they did not lose one email.

    Yahoo site offers serious content, without too much ad harassment, it would be fitting if El Reg would be a bit more kind with them, they do not deserve this.

    1. GrumpenKraut

      Re: The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

      > ... El Reg would be a bit more kind ...

      I'd fall of my chair in shock.

    2. VinceH

      Re: The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

      Yahoo provide mailing lists. Unfortunately, I subscribe to a couple. I used to subscribe to those (and other) mailing lists using my primary email address - but I've recently switched to a separate POP3 account for mailing lists.

      Before making that change, the messages I received from the Yahoo-hosted lists were plain text. Now they're HTML. There doesn't appear to be a way to switch to plain text without having a Yahoo account.

      I did have a Yahoo account once - and must have changed the message format way back when. However, I closed the account because Yahoo kept sending occasional marketing emails despite all my preferences saying no. So I don't want to set up another.

      So Yahoo are annoying - and deserve a bashing AFAIC.

      (And the owners of those mailing lists deserve a good kicking for using Yahoo.)

    3. StripeyMiata

      Re: The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

      I'm still daily use my Rocketmail address from 1997, it's not glamorous but "just works". Can't remember the last time it went down.

      Gmail/Outlook.com Contacts and Calendar are better though I have to admit.

    4. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

      Yahoo Mail is the only one without push apart from a proprietary thing for iPhones. There is no client that will give you push mail on Yahoo apart from the rather terrible Yahoo Mail app or the not particularly good MailDroid which appears to have reverse engineered their push in some way.

      In 2015.

      Oh, they also manage to renovate their webmail interface every five years or so and make it worse.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pretty sure Yahoo have been hacked again recently but its not been reported. Everyone I know with a Yahoo email account has had dodgy emails sent to all their Yahoo contacts list from an email account pretending to be them (but not actually from their Yahoo email address).

    The only reason I can think of for this is that Yahoo have somehow had their users contact lists slurped.

  12. Ross 12

    How does Yahoo! even still exist? Who is using them for, well, anything?

    1. eJ2095

      Yay Retro Search

      Bring back excite.com..... oh wait it still there...

      and lycos?

      1. Gritzwally Philbin

        Re: Yay Retro Search

        > and lycos?

        Lycos is up and down.. though the news feed, while sparse, is working.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In their defence, I saw an advert for facebook on TV last night. I mean, if FB *needs* to publicise itself....

  14. Anonymous Custard
    Trollface

    Money for nothing

    A cynic (we employ none here at El Reg)...

    Of course not, why would you when you get plenty of us doing it for you in these comments for free. ;-)

    Would spoil all our fun anyway otherwise...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Look on the bright side..

    at least those ads won't serve malware.

  16. Christopher Reeve's Horse
    Trollface

    YaWho?

    more like...

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Dull! as! dishwater!

    One for Taboola: "10 weird old reasons why Yahoo! isn't yet a DNS error. We visited their site and even we couldn't get past reason 6 without totally repeating ourselves and we write this crap all day!"

  18. ShadowDragon8685

    Yahoo's still alive?

    They oughta just pack it in and sell off to Google for whatever they'll be given.

  19. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Mother restores profits with this one weird trick

    It must work. It's displayed 10 times on the homepage.

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