There’s no company on the Internet with a marketing strategy more puzzling than Yahoo. When all businesses pay big money for social media marketing, the brilliant strategists at Yahoo decide that their premier social bookmarking web service Delicious does not fit the purpose. Fortunately for the millions of users, Yahoo considers selling the service, not shutting it down. But there are no clues to reveal the identity of the buyer, not even speculations.
Since the news leaked on December 16, the media went ga-ga over nothing, as usual, causing a lot of panic among the users of the network. Yahoo and the Delicious team rushed to point fingers: We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press.
In other words, the press is to blame for the way they related the news. In fact, considering some basic PR courtesy, Yahoo and Delicious were supposed to inform their users about the changes yet to come the moment they took the decision to separate Delicious as a service from Yahoo.
From a user’s perspective, this change can only be good – sure, provided that Delicious does stay open. Yahoo is a dinosaur, and their recent marketing strategies are signs of a terminal illness. When they bought Delicious in 2005, they paid for it something between US$15 million and US$30 million. The actual value of the network today is unknown – many expect it higher, yet with Yahoo’s talent of killing everything they touch (including the once popular MyBlogLog), I don’t expect miracles.
About Delia Gavrilescu
