Yahoo Closes Yahoo Auctions

Yahoo has closed another service, and this time not because it also owned Flickr. Yahoo Auctions will be closing June 16, 2007 in both the U.S. and Canada, while the Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan auction sites will remain open. Some account tools will remain available until October 29.
While I’m sure lots of people used Yahoo Auctions, it must be way too hard for an all-purpose auction site to compete with the likes of eBay. We’ve seen specific niche sites, like StubHub, grow into something popular (and then get bought by eBay, natch), so until eBay does something stupid and ruins its own marketplace, the best bet might be to go small. Yahoo Auctions tried to be eBay, and there’s only room for one of those.
The question I always ask about Google is, is there only room for one major search engine? I bet Yahoo’s […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg