Would You Throw Away 10 Million Unique Monthly Visitors?

Does it seem that there may well be a severe shortage of executives with any business sense these days?

The business model that finally pissed me off enough to leave it behind was Microsoft. Historically, this multi-billion dollar enterprise has always released products with untold flaws, conflicts, security issues, and crashes of sometimes unknown, bewildering origins. Look at the cottage industry including TV and radio shows that have sprung up over the years all dedicated to helping others find their way out of the bewildering mess. Microsoft seems to take the mind-set that they will release a product and then work from that point on to plug their holes and shortcomings. Thus we get interrupted constantly (if you don't take matters into your own hands and set defaults) with various updates for everything from urgent security breeches to suggested updates for compatibility with other programs or hardware.  Constantly.

Then of course, the Masters of Windows will determine what is best for us with their default settings. Do you want or need more individual support? Fine, they have a paid program for that! Have you ever bought a used computer without the disks? If anything goes wrong, you are left to buy new OS disks. Speaking of new disks, it seems the best Windows 7 has to offer is it is more like XP! I have left them and have not looked back. Apple was not my alternative, but more about that another time.

Let's look at AOL. This is one I started with when first coming online. 3 months and I was out and again, never looked back. I simply resented their propitiatory settings and software. For me it was the idea that any one that wanted to include a link in an email had to format it specifically for AOL. Remember those links that noted,  AOL users click here'? They had a history of hundreds of people complaining because they were continuing to be billed even after attempts to cancel. Somehow they were able to side-step most of that damage. So thousands believe they are offered so many benefits by being with AOL and pay through the nose for the priviledge. It breaks my heart to see people still under their thumb.  Innovative? Hardly. Want or need more support or services, pay up!

So we come to the genius behind the decision by Yahoo! to dump an unprofitable aspect of their business model that receives 10 MILLION Unique visitors* any given month. In April of this year it was announced Yahoo would shut down it's free website service GeoCities. The alternative offered was their paid hosting services, not one of the better bargains available with the abundance of hosting companies. October 26 it was official. On one hand I am glad to see the move because of the prolific number of porn websites and portals that had been set up. Then they would  bombard my free Yahoo! mail account that I have had for years. Yahoo! would not even filter these emails that had headlines like "&()_^%$##@po.rn." Ridiculous.

However, there were also hundreds of thousands of folks that were able to make their initial plunge into establishing an online presence with GeoCities. It was one of the pace-setters allowing for novices to work with and learn website building and networking with family and friends. Many successful marketers and those that went on to run successful enterprises tested and developed their skills with GeoCities.

The point is why would a company throw away so much free traffic? It just seems unexplainable how no one was able to find a way to leverage that amount of clout and continue the service. Companies spend millions of dollars in attempts to generate those kind of visitor numbers.  

It seems Yahoo! has basically removed itself from entering into what is now known as the new age of Internet 2.0. That basically acknowledges social sites like MySpace,  FaceBook and Twitter and the millions interwoven and connected. With all the seemingly content users of GeoCities, it may have behoved Yahoo marketing execs to seek out some kind of alliance with the growing popularity of a service like WordPress.com which also offers free hosting of a blog in a matter of minutes.

Self-hosted WordPress blogs have quickly become a standard for even business sites as opposed to a static website, or is a major part of one, to allow for more immediate communications. All of these traffic generation tools help with site ranking, networking with family, friends, business associates and overall marketing efforts. It also includes such mundane up-to-the-minute tidbits like what millions have had for lunch and how long they have slept.

It is just hard to imagine what is gained, except in the short-run, for a major player like Yahoo! to throw out a huge niche that any enterprise would die for by taking such a hard-nosed stance that equals "pay us or move on." It seems that some attempt to reach out to those thousands that may lack a whole lot of technical savvy and have given them at least some attention so to  migrate comfortably would have been the least they could have offered. It is unrealistic that only with a little creative imagination they could have even continued on with the base established that would have to be a more profitable move overall by keeping a connection with their users and all the potential profitable traffic already in place.

Instead, it looks like a lot of resentment will result because they choose to throw out the baby - and 10 MILLION visitors/month - with the bath water for immediate effects on the bottom line.

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*Unique visitor:
"When tracking the amount of traffic on a Web site, it refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. Software that tracks and counts Web site traffic can distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site. Different from a site's hits or page views -- which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site -- unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses, which are like online fingerprints, and unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site. There are some ISPs that use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, such as AOL and cable modem providers, which use different IPs for every file requested, making one visitor look like many. In this case, a single IP address does not indicate a unique visitor.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/unique_visitor.html

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