Once one of the giants of internet search, Yahoo! has fallen on hard times compared to its illustrious past. The most recent search engine rankings put them with a paltry 10 percent of explicit web searches in the US, nearly half the share of Bing and not even a sixth of the share that Google has. But even if Yahoo isn’t the most popular search engines, there are still a lot of reasons for people to visit the site. News articles, email services, videos, and more keep people coming back to Yahoo! even if not for searching. Here are seven surprising stats that show Yahoo is still relevant.
According to data from BIA/Kelsey, about 16 percent of U.S. consumers use Yahoo for local shopping. The percentage for hispanic consumers who use Yahoo for local shopping is slightly higher.
Yahoo also has a large audience with mobile users. Research from comScore found that 82.4 percent of US mobile internet users used Yahoo! sites or apps in Q4 2013.
A different comScore study noted that 53.5 million Americans watched videos on Yahoo! sites in December 2013, for an average of 47.8 minutes.
For US consumers, the gap between Yahoo and the other major websites isn’t as deep as many would assume. According to Nielsen, 129.8 million Americans visited Yahoo! per month in 2013, compared to Google 164.8 million and 134.9 million for Facebook. If Yahoo gets nearly as much attention as Facebook, it’s worth it for some businesses to make sure their business can be found through Yahoo listings.
More Americans get their news from Yahoo than from other major news outlets. According to a study Nielsen released in November 2013, 47.3 million Americans visited Yahoo-ABC News websites in September 2013, compared to 41.5 million for CNN, and 32.2 million for the Huffington Post.
Yahoo is also used nearly as much as Google for social logins on certain sites. Gigya reported that 21 percent of social media log ins by media and publishing sites are with Yahoo!, compared to 28 percent for Google+, and 44 percent for Facebook.
Yahoo! may only account for about 10 percent of US explicit core searches, that still translate to a lot of time on Yahoo! Nielsen reported that 128 million Americans accessed Yahoo! in November 2013, for an average of 2 hours 4 minutes.
It’s important to understand what these statistics means to marketers. For SEO, it changes little. Since more than two-thirds of US searchers are done on Google, SEO best tactics will be pegged to the actions taken by Google. However, as these statistics show, there are a lot of other reasons for people to visit Yahoo! and to ignore the company completely isn’t in a company’s best interest. For example, if a business can be found on Google My Business but not on Yahoo, then the business may be missing out on 16 percent of local searchers. Similarly, with over 50 million Americans watching videos on Yahoo!, adding a marketing video to the platform could giver extra exposure for a business. Yahoo may not be the biggest name in the game anymore, but it is still relevant for marketers who want to reach potential customers.