Yahoo To Shut Down Its Blogging Platform in Vietnam

The End of an Era? | photo via http://blog.ineedhits.com/

Starting January 17th next year, bloggers on the Vietnamese version of the Yahoo Blog platform will not be able to login to their Yahoo blogs anymore as the whole thing is shut down. This is confirmed by a post on the official Yahoo Vietnam blog.

It will close one of Yahoo’s final chapters in Vietnam. Yahoo once dominated the Vietnamese social media scene with tens of millions of members on Yahoo 360 across the country in 2009. But by the end of that year, they shut down the service worldwide and asked users to migrate to the ridiculously-named Yahoo360plus, a move that most Vietnamese bloggers didn’t like. After the release of Yahoo360plus, a great many bloggers moved their blogs to Facebook and some moved over to WordPress and Tumblr. In 2011, Yahoo360plus was shut down to make way for Yahoo Blog – resulting in a further loss of users.

Many Vietnamese people still use Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as their communication mediums, but in the past few years a lot of companies – and people in general – have slowly moved away from Yahoo. Instead, Skype, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp and Gmail have been chiseling away at Yahoo’s Vietnamese web empire. Yahoo is also set to shut down its public chat rooms in Vietnam. This leaves behind only Yahoo Search, Yahoo News VN, and email, as Vietnamese users’ final Yahoo territories.

It was just a few years ago that Microsoft and Yahoo were the only well-known web companies among the average Vietnamese netizen. But Yahoo’s gradual vanishing in Vietnam from 2008 to 2011 was no doubt connected to its crumbling management and the onslaught from the now-dominant social media and web giants of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. We’ve seen this happen in Indonesia too, where Yahoo shuttered the once very promising Koprol, a sort of Foursquare-like check-in service that the ailing giant acquired.

Despite Yahoo’s crumbling history, I suspect the latest moves here may be born out of a new-found focus under Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, whose leadership is said to have breathed new enthusiasm into Yahoo’s staff. How this will impact Yahoo’s future in Vietnam remains to be seen, as other companies are quickly developing loyal users while Yahoo steadily cedes its hold over Vietnamese keystrokes and eyeballs.

[Source: Yahoo! Blog Vietnam – article in Vietnamese]