Yahoo has adopted a new logo for the first time since shortly after the company’s founding 18 years ago.
The redesigned look unveiled late Wednesday is part of a makeover that Yahoo Inc. has been undergoing since the Sunnyvale, California, company hired Google executive Marissa Mayer to become Yahoo’s CEO 14 months ago.
Mayer has already spruced up Yahoo’s front page, email and Flickr photo-sharing service, as well as engineered a series of acquisitions aimed at attracting more traffic on mobile devices.
The shopping spree has been highlighted by Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, a blogging service where the company rolled out its new logo.
The logo was shown both with purple letters and in white with a purple background spelling out the word Yahoo!, with no letters touching and ending with an exclamation point.
“We wanted a logo that stayed true to our roots (whimsical, purple, with an exclamation point) yet embraced the evolution of our products,” a statement on the website said.
In an effort to drum up more interest in the changeover, Yahoo spent the past 30 days showing some of the proposed logos that Mayer and other executives cast aside.
The revision is the first time that Yahoo has made a significant change to its logo since a few tweaks shortly after co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporated the company in 1995.
Mayer’s overhaul of Yahoo has attracted a lot of attention, but so far it hasn’t provided a significant lift to the company’s revenue. Yahoo depends on advertising to make most of its money, an area where the company’s growth has been anemic while more marketing dollars flow to rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
Yahoo’s stock has climbed by nearly 80%, but most of that gain has been driven by the company’s 24% stake in China’s Alibaba Holdings Group. Investors prize Alibaba because it has emerged as one of the fastest growing companies on the internet.
