Yahoo Makes It to Sweet Sixteen

via Yahoo

Yahoo is old enough that it can get a job, a driver’s license, and (if it lived in Germany) drink beer. That’s right: Yahoo has made it to its sweet sixteen, surviving the more than a decade and a half. While Yahoo has changed its form somewhat, focusing in on less search-oriented features, making it to this age is no small accomplishment.

Yahoo celebrated the anniversary in their offices all around the world, but the most visible celebration for users could be found on Twitter. Yahoo used the occasion to tell sixteen fun facts about the company. Here’s a brief summary:

• Every day, there are over 13 million variations of the Yahoo homepage.
• Yahoo is ranked in the top 10 most green publicly traded companies in the U.S.
• The company was ranked as the “most trust technology company in the world” by the Edelmean Trust Barometer in 2010.
• Yahoo Mail is still the number one web mail service, receiving twice the traffic of competitor Gmail.
• Yahoo gets more sports searches each month than any other search engine.
• Yahoo Messenger remains the top IM service in the U.S.
• Yahoo Groups currently has 13.7 million groups and 140 million total subscribers.
• Flickr had more than 2,100 images uploaded each minute in November of 2010.
• Yahoo topped thirteen categories for search in 2010, including News, Mail, Finance, and Shopping.
• In December of 2010, 3.4 billion searches were performed on the Yahoo site.
• Yahoo Mail prevented 582 billion spam messages from hitting inboxes in November of last year alone.
• Yahoo Shine was the largest site in the U.S. made for the “women’s audience.”
• Yahoo Finance topped the financial category in visitors last year, nearly tripling the second place competitor (MSN Money).
• Yahoo OMG is the top site for entertainment news, with December of 2010 showing over 25 million visitors.
• Over 31 million users accessed Yahoo Mail on a mobile platform in October of 2010 alone.
• Yahoo Shopping saw 23 million visitors in December of 2010 alone.

These posts serve as a good reminder that Yahoo is still alive and well, if only because they’ve got a strangehold on some of the most crucial niches. In any case, Yahoo, happy birthday. I wish you hundreds of fat children and many glorious returns (or comebacks, as the case may be).

[via Yahoo’s Twitter page, with special thanks to the Topsy compilation]