After 15 Years of Trying, Yahoo Gives Up In Korea

Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is promising to get Yahoo back on track and that promise includes ceasing to do business in Korea. After 15 years of operation it’s hard to admit defeat, but with only 1% market share it makes little business sense to remain in Korea.

“People don’t use Yahoo much here and it’s not generating much traffic. There’s no reason for them to stay in this Far East Asian market.”

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Yahoo Japan seems to do fine however (Yahoo Auctions still runs there). Could see Yahoo Japan staying long after the US site goes, if it ever does.

People still use yahoo? Wow.

mknlb50 said:

People still use yahoo? Wow.

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My android phone uses a Yahoo weather widget by default on the homescreen. Occasionally I use my circa 1999 yahoo email address for website signups I figure will produce spam. After a while the account seems to be deactivated automatically thus solving the spam problem. Other than that, I can't think of any place I've even seen Yahoo lately.

Isn't Korea pretty much banned from the Internet anyway because it would allow exposure to the outside world where there's insane stuff like punk rock and that cheese that comes in a spray can? I would think that they have about as much Internet access there as backwards places like the deep south in the US.

I am not surprised. I gave up on yahoo ever since they put flash ads on its web site.

SkribbelKat said:

Isn't Korea pretty much banned from the Internet anyway because it would allow exposure to the outside world where there's insane stuff like punk rock and that cheese that comes in a spray can? I would think that they have about as much Internet access there as backwards places like the deep south in the US.

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Don't confuse South Korea with its northern counterpart. SK is pretty much as westernized and industrialized as it gets.

South Korean broadband is( or at least was in 2006) the fastest and most developed network in the world.

Wait wait wait... You can go straight to yahoo!?

I've been typing "take me to yahoo" in my Alta Vista search bar all this time!

/giggle

allot of my friends go on yahoo just to check out the interesting stories of the day, idk if they actually use the search engine though.

DeathPrincess said:

Yahoo Japan seems to do fine however (Yahoo Auctions still runs there). Could see Yahoo Japan staying long after the US site goes, if it ever does.

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DHL comes to mind. A company that pretty much died in the USA, goes to japan reinvents itself then tries to break back into the US market years later.

whats a yahoo?

TheGamerZ said:

Wait wait wait... You can go straight to yahoo!?

I've been typing "take me to yahoo" in my Alta Vista search bar all this time!

/giggle

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I laughed out loud on that one. The mental picture is priceless. Well played sir.

I'm surprised that Yahoo didn't bow out of South Korea earlier, given that NHN's Naver has dominated the Korean search market for years (70% share as of 2011); even big-time player Google is having a hard time maintaining a position in Korea.

SkribbelKat said:

Isn't Korea pretty much banned from the Internet anyway because it would allow exposure to the outside world where there's insane stuff like punk rock and that cheese that comes in a spray can? I would think that they have about as much Internet access there as backwards places like the deep south in the US.

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lol...

Raap said:

South Korean broadband is( or at least was in 2006) the fastest and most developed network in the world.

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South Korea's broadband is trash. They give some outrageous speed claim, which you never actually get. My 100 mbps connection in Pyeongtaek City, was actually around 5-7 mbps. Sometimes I'd see 10 mbps. Had some friends in Seoul with 100 mbps connections that were actually more like 40 mbps.

Fastest broadband? Hardly. Highest broadband penetration? Most definitely. Even in the boondocks of S.Korea, you could get broadband.

Now Japan, that place definitely has some crazy fast broadband, but it's not possible to get those crazy speeds everywhere. Nor possible to even get broadband everywhere. My friend was rocking a 1 gig fiber line and it definitely was 1 gig. When we first tried to cap out the bandwidth, we couldn't do it with 1 torrent. We were held back by lack of peers. So we had to run multiple torrents to cap it out. Mind you, this was back in 2005. Can't remember, but don't think torrents were widely used yet.