Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo AABA -0.76% still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.
Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc., has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.
Charles Arthur, in The Overspill, said it best:
Yahoo is like an object circling a black hole’s event horizon: it’s taking forever to actually fall in, yet its fate is certain. There’s simply no way for it to climb back out to be relevant.
Hard to argue. Been a long time since I’ve encountered a Yahoo email account. This does not seem like a winning strategy.
It’s sad to see how such a once-pioneering company turned into a skidmark.
The last Yahoo email account I had any connection to was my fiancee’s father, who was 94. He never changed his email address to the day he died last November.
I thought the Yahoo brand had been deleted. and replaced by some other unrecognized name.
From wikipedia: Yahoo mail had 225 million active monthly users in February 2017. That’s a lot of data to sell.