Through The Fly's Eyes: Yahoo!

from Theflyonthewall.com





Momentum Rolling Over

Yahoo's (YHOO) traffic, be it search or total visits, is beginning to resemble the New York Yankees in the Major League Baseball rankings, writes Om Malik of GigaOm.

The total number of visitors to various Google (GOOG) properties was up 18% yoy to 536 million, followed by Microsoft (MSFT) with 528 million, up 5%, and Yahoo ranking #3 with an actual decline -- about 2% yoy -- in the number of monthly visitors to 470 million. This is the second month of consecutive declines for Yahoo -- simply not good.

To provide some perspective, worldwide Internet traffic grew 9% in the month of May 2007, while the US saw a 3% increase in traffic for the month. In the U.S., Yahoo remains #1 with 131 million visitors, up 0.3%, the lowest we have tracked. Google is at #3 position with 120 million unique visitors, up 15% year-over-year. So Yahoo is clearly losing ground.

In the world of wireless mobile search, the data look even worse for Yahoo. In mobile space, M:Metrics reports that smart phone users prefer Google over Yahoo, especially in US and UK, where Google commands 62.5% and 31% reach. Yahoo in comparison has about 33.5% and 11% reach respectively, Malik notes.

Jerry Yang has his work cut out for him. Google is a steamship with few, if any, able to stand in its way.