Netflix may have been a Yahoo-owned service if different decisions were made a decade ago. In a new interview for Tech Brew, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer opened up about the biggest regrets she has from her time working with the company. One of the first regrets named by Mayer was hiring “the wrong COO,” saying she should have instead hired Integral Ad Science CEO Lisa Utzschneider instead. Another regret, with Mayer noting she has three big ones in total, is that they “should have done the tax-free Alibaba spinoff to separate the assets of the company.” That could have saved around $10 billion for company shareholders, Mayer now says.
Meanwhile, the third biggest regret from Mayer was in the lack of foresight over the future success of streaming services. The former CEO explains that back in 2013, Yahoo was looking to make a big acquisition as a way of moving the company forward in a major way. She says they were eyeing both Netflix and Hulu as possible contenders, but they ultimately chose to go with the blogging website Tumblr. The result was Netflix and Hulu growing to become much bigger in subsequent years, while Yahoo would soon enough struggle to effectively monetize Tumblr. As Mayer explains:
“We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4 billion and Hulu was at $1.3 billion at the time. And either of those, with hindsight being 20/20, would have been a better acquisition.”
Streaming Only Continued to Rise in Popularity
Per Variety, Yahoo had shelled out around $1.1 billion for its acquisition of Tumblr. Both Netflix and Hulu would have been a bit more costly, but would have been much more worth the investment in the long run. The report notes that the market capitalization for Netflix in May 2013 was $12.7 billion, compared to what it was at this past Friday with $143.5 billion. Verizon would later acquire Yahoo in 2017 for $4.5 billion, and in 2019, they sold Tumblr to Automattic for around $3 million.
Yahoo had also attempted to get in on the streaming wars by launching their own exclusive video-streaming service, dubbed Yahoo Screen. The peak of Yahoo Screen’s success was probably in securing a new season for Community after the show had been canceled on television. But, ultimately, Yahoo Screen could not compete with the likes of Netlfix and other streaming services, and the service was shut down by 2016.
In the years since, the streaming wars would only get more competitive. Disney+ would launch in 2019 followed by HBO Max in 2020, and both have found a lot of success. CBS All Access, which originally launched in 2014, has found more success after rebranding as Paramount+ in 2021. Other streamers on the fast rise in recent years finding their own way in the streaming wars include NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Apple TV+, and Amazon’s Prime Video.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
