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Marissa Mayer defends new logo as Yahoo hits 800 million monthly users

Marissa Mayer defends new logo as Yahoo hits 800 million monthly users

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"We did it in a way that came from a very authentic place," the CEO says

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Yahoo's new logo has plenty of detractors, but CEO Marissa Mayer is standing behind it. "I like the way the logo turned out, and I like the way that we did it," Mayer told interviewer Michael Arrington today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Mayer said they approached the logo redesign as a startup would, resolving not to spend money on outside consultants and instead built it in-house.

Mayer didn't discuss specifics of the new design, which is based on the Optima font and has drawn howls of protests from typographers. "We need to be really entrepreneurial," Mayer said. "Our attitude is to be really scrappy. We kept it in-house, we didn't spend millions of dollars doing it. We did it in a way that came from a very authentic place."

"Our attitude is to be really scrappy."

Mayer announced on stage that Yahoo now has 800 million monthly active users, including 350 million monthly users on the company's mobile apps. That does not include traffic to Tumblr, which the company acquired for $1.1 billion earlier this year.

Asked what she was doing to fight back against the government pursuit of user data, Mayer said Yahoo has long pushed back against broad requests. But she said the company is constrained by the fact that even discussing many of the requests is illegal. "Releasing classified information is treason, which generally lands you incarcerated," she said. "We think it makes more sense in terms of scrutinizing requests, analyzing them, doing our best to protect our users. It makes sense for us to work within the system." Yahoo and Facebook filed suit against the government Monday in an effort to force more transparency.

Mayer recently completed her first year at the venerable internet giant, where she is in the midst of trying to revitalize a company that has hundreds of millions of users but declining revenues. The company has recently seen a surge in traffic to its sites, and released well received mobile apps, but has yet to translate those efforts into higher earnings. Mayer said she is focused on turning the company around. "My ultimate goal is to get the company growing again," she said.