Yahoo to stop selling porn
By Brian Bergstein
AP Business Writer
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Swamped with thousands of complaints from users, Yahoo! Inc. said Friday it will stop selling X-rated videos and other pornographic material on its Web pages.
The flap comes at a difficult time for Yahoo, which had been one of the biggest Internet success stories but is now struggling to make money and just announced layoffs.
Yahoo has had adult items on its shopping pages for two years. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported that Yahoo had quietly expanded its offering of hard-core videos and DVDs in search of new revenue.
Yahoo president and chief operating officer Jeff Mallett said Friday that the company had not significantly increased its selection of adult products, but had simply created a new category for them and tightened controls to keep children out.
Still, Mallett said the perception that Yahoo was embracing porn led users to swamp the company with angry calls and e-mails.
As a result, Yahoo said porn will be removed from its shopping and auction pages and its classified listings, and the company will stop entering into new contracts for banner advertisements for adult merchandise.
"Our main concern is our users. Their opinion matters most," Mallett said.
Most other leading Internet companies have kept a greater distance from adult material.
Porn has long been one of the Internet's biggest money makers, but Mallett said dropping X-rated material would not affect Yahoo's bottom line. Spokeswoman Nicki Dugan said adult material is "an insignificant portion of revenue."
Yahoo is an Internet portal — a jumping-off point for Internet shopping and browsing, as well as a place to visit in its own right. It claims to have 192 million registered users worldwide.
Yahoo was the third most popular Web site in the United States last month, with 60 million visitors, behind AOL Time Warner and Microsoft networks, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
Once one of the most profitable Internet companies, Yahoo has seen online advertising — which generated 90 percent of last year's sales — plunge with the dot-com bust and the overall slowing of the economy.
Yahoo revenue is expected to drop at least 30 percent this year from $1.1 billion in 2000. On Wednesday, the company announced more than 400 layoffs, 12 percent of the work force.
Yahoo has been embroiled in other controversies over the material on its huge site.
French groups sued last year to block Yahoo from letting Nazi memorabilia be sold on its auction pages. A French judge ordered Yahoo to keep French users from seeing the items.
Yahoo said the order would be impossible to comply with. Later, after Yahoo banned the sale of Nazi merchandise, saying it did not want to profit from it. Still, Yahoo is asking a federal judge to rule that French court decisions cannot be enforced against American companies.
Yahoo also has come under fire for serving as a host to online chats by white supremacists and other hate groups.
Yahoo recently began donating ad space in the chat rooms to Tolerance.org, a new site set up by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The ads also appear when users enter words such as "Nazi" or "hate" on Yahoo's search engine.
