You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

They’re becoming the Jim Cramer of the internet, eh?

If it doesn’t come through my RSS it does not get read. The articles written now even have ads in them.

Agreed.. Like the ad about some mom’s strange discovery. Absolute junk.

They would not be advertising if the readership were not responsive to such junk.

Kind of the equivalent to the goldbug and market paranoia driven ads that run on Sirius/XM’s CNBC channel. On TV (and even online) it’s easier to ignore the ads.

I think it is an indication of a failing strategy. If they don’t care enough about their image and customers to allow such ads to run, they must really, really need money… and ready to get it almost by all means. Which probably will mean less customers… less revenue… less budgets for innovation… more low quality ways to bring money… Sort of a downward spiral.

4 years ago, Jason said “I’d rather be Microsoft than Yahoo” in this blog.

In my comment, I wrote “Yahoo is dying faster than Microsoft. So many people didn`t agree with me. According to them, Yahoo was an innovative company:)

Original post:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/387-id-rather-be-microsoft-than-yahoo

Yahoo is dead.

@Ugur you should go back to that post and click all the links (their names) of the people that disagreed with you and see how many are still active or unkempt.

37signals should do a little blog mining and correlate failed predictions with dead/unkempt/inactive personal links.

That’s the SvN blog post I want to read.

They would not be advertising if the readership were not responsive to such junk.

I’d be highly surprised if this long-standing canard were true.

I’d like to hear what this Mister X has to say

The foul is worse than just crappy adds. Trying to make those adds look like actual stories is a much bigger deal. All it takes is a simple border and a heading that says their are adds or if you don’t like borders go with a bunch of space and a readable but not-to-small heading.

Guys, this isn’t Yahoo specific AT ALL . Look at the website for almost any major news organization and you’ll see ads for scams all over the place. I’ve always taken it as a sign that they still aren’t taking the web seriously. The print version is the “real” version of their news and so they just don’t worry about the web too much.

CNN has been running those “secrets to health/weight loss” ads with unrelated sexy women in the pictures. It’s disgraceful.

Yahoo Finance get like 45 million unique visitors a month and it is very difficult to completely sell out all the ad space. Thus, they use ad networks to fill in the gaps between the big sponsorships.

Isn’t Jason really into those Amish fireplace ads? I would expect you to post these and go on about how these penny stock scammers are getting real, their design works, and snobs who don’t make ads with big blue fonts on principle aren’t good designers.

When talking about Yahoo, don’t you think this company lacks leadership and vision? Don’t they have enough money to hire somebody with such talents? Or maybe shareholders think they are smarter?

I saw Yahoo presentation in Germany this year and they didn’t know what they were talking about. They don’t understand Web 2.0 but try to pretend they do. Especially comparing to guys from SalesForce.com which offered a great show and embrace new media quite well.

@Tony R

I agree with you