"Yahoo! is Toast!" claims New Web Portal

A new Web portal has been launched that hopes to appeal to unhappy Yahoo! portal users and lure them away from Yahoo. The new portal, MyWay.com, has launched an aggressive advertising campaign in 38 major Internet markets, including Yahoo's own community of Sunnyvale, California, declaring that "Yahoo! Is Toast!" Bill Daugherty, a CEO of BullDog Holdings, which salvaged the Excite Network from bankruptcy, is the brainchild behind the MyWay.com campaign. He is counting on the fact that many Web surfers are fed up with Yahoo's fee-based services, on top of the plethora of annoying ads that appear on the site and clog its speed. Daughtery is also banking on the fact that Yahoo users are fed up with Yahoo's newly "loosened" privacy policies, which enable Yahoo to sell a broader range of its registered users' personal information.

Daugherty claims that MyWay will offer many of Yahoo's features without charging fees, using annoying advertising or using privacy invasive practices. MyWay will use the resources of the Excite Network, which has only 157 employees, compared to Yahoo's 3,600. MyWay.com claims that it will be profitable through pay-for-placement listings in its "search" function, which are powered by Internet search engine, Google. Predicts Daugherty, "Once we get the word out, people are going to start coming to MyWay and they are going to like what they see. If people spend just three minutes at MyWay, they won't go back to Yahoo again."