Despite heavy media and shareholder scrutiny of Yahoo’s direction - activist shareholder group Starboard Value urged the company to consider buying AOL in a letter late last week - Yahoo has had better consumer perception levels than most major social media sites over the past two years.
And potential target AOL? They have the lowest score of the group.
For these measurements, YouGov BrandIndex used its Index score, its flagship metric for overall brand health. The Index score is the average of six sub-scores which measure Impression, Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Reputation, and Willingness to Recommend. A score can range from 100 to -100 with a zero score equaling positive and negative feedback.
Currently, Yahoo has the third best brand health of all major social media sites with a 29 Index score, behind Google (51) and YouTube (44). Just behind Yahoo is Facebook at 22, which had been slowly gaining from early 2013 and catching up with Yahoo this past May, but has gradually cooled off, coinciding with the mandatory migration to its Messenger app.
Pinterest has been steadily rising for the past 21 months, from an 11 score to its present 17, putting it a few points behind Facebook.
Twitter has increased from a 3 Index score to a current 8, while AOL has moved from slightly negative to zero more recently, indicating steady neutral feedback from consumers.
All respondents to this research are adults 18 and over
Index Scores: Yahoo!, AOL, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter
