Twelve years after an unknown company called Yahoo! purchased a well-known hording space in San Francisco’s urban landscape, the sign is history. But in a sign of the company’s declining fortunes, construction workers dismantled the landmark advert Wednesday.
Yahoo has displayed its prominent position as one of the pioneers of the dot-com bubble with an iconic purple billboard along the driveway to San Francisco’s Bay Bridge since the early days of the internet. Since the boom, the captivating purple Yahoo sign over the freeway has served as a neon reminder of the Bay Area’s history innovation, technology and wealth.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo removed the Clear Channel advertising space last month, and the iconic sign was permanently taken down in pieces on Wednesday.
A worker moves a section of a Yahoo! billboard onto a truck on December 21, 2011 in San Francisco, California. Yahoo’s iconic retro-style billboard was taken down after 12 years of greeting visitors to San Francisco. The brightly colored billboard, reminiscent of a 1960’s era motel sign, was installed in 1999 next to Interstate 80 near downtown San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
If you do not regularly drive out of the City towards the East Bay, the attractive purple billboard ad resembled a retro motel vacancy sign that seemed to resonate with drivers, sporting the slogan: “Yahoo! Where the world checks in daily,” with a frequently updated portion of the design that reflected both updates at Yahoo and current San Francisco events. It went up in 1999, when the Sunnyvale-based Internet search company was still in its youth and leading the dot-com boom.
Check out a few of our favorite Yahoo sign memories. Some of the mind bending Slogans were like: “Honk if you are single–Yahoo Personals” and “Go Giants! World Series Champs” gave the sign a decidedly San Francisco personality, and soon made it a landmark in the SF skyline. So long, Yahoo sign. The commute will never be the same.
But Yahoo facing harsh competition and shrinking advertising revenue from the likes of Google and Facebook and has been under pressure to revitalize the company ever since it rejected a 47.5-billion-dollar buyout offer from Microsoft in 2008, more than double the company’s current value, has pulled out of the prime advertising spot. Fast forward a decade and Yahoo! no longer reigns and the sign no longer shines.
A Yahoo spokesperson told the San Jose Mercury News that the company is focused on “new and innovative ways” to market itself.
With the purple landmark finally dismantled, Clear Channel, which manages the space, began offering it for as little as $65,000 a month starting Dec. 1.