SEOYahoo Retires Less Popular Products to Make Room for New Innovation

Yahoo Retires Less Popular Products to Make Room for New Innovation

Yahoo is shutting down a range of its not-so-popular products, in order to focus on its more popular ones. Included in the cull is people search, Xobni, toolbar on Chrome, and Shine.

In an effort to focus on developing some of its more popular products, Yahoo has decided to retire some of its not-so-popular ones. However, all is not lost. Many of the features from the newly retired products have been integrated into other areas of its product set.

Yahoo first announced its upcoming changes earlier this year and eliminated products such as Newlook Service, Research Reports, and Bookmarks.yahoo.com in April and May. Yesterday, the company revealed further changes.

In a blog post confirming the move, Jay Rossiter, senior vice president, Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo writes, “Over the past two years, our teams have been incredibly focused on our mission: making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. This focus has allowed us to launch some new, exciting products while giving us the opportunity to make the core products our users already love even better.

“To achieve this, we took a hard look at our products and have shut down some of the less popular ones and integrated widely loved features from others into core Yahoo experiences.”

So, what additional Yahoo products are facing elimination?

People Search: As a user, you want one place to find everything you need. You can use Yahoo Search to find people, blogs, places, maps – anything. That’s why today, July 2, we are closing down Yahoo People Search, a defunct directory site that’s no longer useful. Check out Yahoo Search to find the people you’re looking for.

Xobni: As we announced in July 2013, although we are shutting down Xobni.com and the Smartr Product Suite today, July 2, we have incorporated many Xobni-like features into Yahoo Mail (like compose auto-suggest and people-centric mail search) and the technology behind the product continues to inform our current and future user experiences.

Yahoo Toolbar on Chrome: By July 22, the Yahoo Toolbar will be removed from the Chrome Web store, to comply with recent Google Chrome policy updates. Instead, we now offer the Yahoo Extension for Chrome, which will give you quick access to Yahoo.com whenever you open a new tab. The Toolbar is still available for Firefox and Internet Explorer at toolbar.yahoo.com. Install the Toolbar and sign in to your Yahoo account to access your personalized settings.

Yahoo Shine: We recently unveiled several new digital magazines that dive deeper into the topics our users have come to love on Yahoo Shine and offer unique advertising opportunities for brands. While Yahoo Shine will be closing on July 31, through our digital magazines, like Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel, we will continue to bring these topics to life with stunning visuals, a strong editorial voice and engaging native advertising.

Yahoo Voices and the Yahoo Contributor Network: On July 31, Voices.Yahoo.com will be shut down and at the end of August, Contributor.Yahoo.com closes. Yahoo will be notifying contributors and please refer to this FAQ for more details.

Yahoo is determined to focus its energy on what it calls its “four core areas.” Included in this group are Search, Communications, Digital Magazines, and Video. The company will also invest efforts in further developing Flickr and Tumblr.

While Yahoo’s recent changes may not affect marketers directly, it is clear that it will change the way that consumers utilize Yahoo. Do you think that the large number of changes will push users to try other search engines such as Google or Bing? Let us know in the comments section below!

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