Yahoo!'s European staff have been given a deadline to turn around parts of the business that have been performing badly.
Toby Coppel, the head of Yahoo!'s European operations, told the FT that some of the firm's regional properties may be sold off if there is no improvement in their figures by Q1 2008.
Services coming under scrutiny include shopping comparison site Kelkoo, the paper added.
While Yahoo! has a 14% share of the search market worldwide, it holds just 3% of the market in Europe, according to comScore. Also, just 42% of the European web population view its sites.
Coppel, who took over the European leadership role in April. said it aimed to fix this problem by providing more relevant content for European users, though it won't be producing more local content or adding more staff.
He added:
"If you make the content more relevant, people will come. If you make a great product, they will come."
Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang also recently warned that some of the company's investments may be sold or shut down.
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Graham Charlton is Senior Reporter at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.
Posted 19 November 2007 10:34am by Graham Charlton with 3 comments
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
1:34PM on 19th November 2007
yes i agree, well said, great web site
6:38PM on 20th November 2007
The alternative for Yahoo, would be to make these "properties" good. Kelkoo is a perfect case in point. It was the market leader in the UK shopping comparision sector, and one my sites used to get about 20% of its traffic from Kelkoo - and it was good, relevant traffic that converted at about 50% of the cost per acquisition we were managing with Google Adwords.
In the last year to eighteen months the traffic from Kelkoo has dropped to a small single percentage figure of the site's total traffic.
It would seem that nobody at Kelkoo cares anymore. The waited far too long to improve their technology - ask them for management reporting and you get a daily email of clicks... and their attempt at adding reviews was rubbish. Every other shopping comparision site offers more to merchants and consumers now, even those which are still much smaller than Kelkoo in terms of their market penetration.
Their staff seem utterly demovated and display a "couldn't give a s&&t" attitude - we recently asked our account manager to arrange for a new site we are launching to get set up, and we got a one line email saying she had passed it on to the relevant person. All our other account managers were much more positive and have followed up to make sure we are still coming on board (last minute delays you see). No one has bothered to follow-up from Kelkoo.
And this is not just one bad apple - not unless everyone at Kelkoo was specially recruited for their lack of concern for customers - because it is the same every time you speak to a different person at Kelkoo. These, I doubt are bad staff, rather the company they work for has utterly lost its mojo.
Finally, please don't think for a second that I bear Kelkoo (or Yahoo) for that matter any ill will. Quite the opposite. I want to see a healthy and happy Kelkoo back at the top of the Shopping comparision game - because they do have a property that consumers recognise, but it needs to re-discover what made it great the first time around. Perhaps a change of ownership is needed - MSN perhaps?
11:32AM on 4th April 2008
If you want to sell your real estate in europe or when you are looking for a property to buy you should visit www.PropertyMarket.eu
This is a free website for the European Property Market.