Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, spent much of the last two years telling Wall Street that video was a cornerstone of her turnaround strategy.
Now, Yahoo is vastly playing down its commitment to video. The Internet company confirmed Monday that its four-year-old video portal, called Yahoo Screen, was shut down last week. That follows the $42 million write-off on original video content that Yahoo took in October.
The popularity of Yahoo Screen paled in comparison with YouTube, but the portal still had a substantial audience: about 15 million unique visitors in the United States in November, according to comScore, a research firm.
It was also a one-stop destination where visitors could find all of the company’s video content — its licensed reruns of “Saturday Night Live,” original series like “Community,” a daily live-streamed concert from Live Nation, the National Football League game it streamed in October and clips from the company’s themed topic areas, which it calls digital magazines.
Now all that video has been scattered throughout the rest of Yahoo — and good luck finding it. A search for “Saturday Night Live” or “SNL” on Yahoo’s own search engine Monday sent you to NBC, YouTube and Hulu — everywhere but Yahoo. The results were similar when searching for “Community series.”
Arunav Sinha, a Yahoo spokesman, said that Yahoo decided to relocate its video content within the company’s various digital magazines. So the Live Nation concerts are on Yahoo Music and “Community” on Yahoo TV, albeit buried deep within menus on the mobile version of Yahoo. (Mr. Sinha said the “Saturday Night Live” reruns are temporarily offline while the company moves them.)
“We are better off promoting one destination like Yahoo Music than different destinations for music,” Mr. Sinha said.
Yahoo had devoted fewer resources to Screen in recent months, so the shutdown was not entirely a surprise to people who follow the company closely.
But Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, said the decision, which was first reported online by Variety, reflected Yahoo’s shrinking video ambitions. He said the company would probably focus more of its efforts on creating cheap videos for its digital magazines, and selling ads around those, than on trying to land big-budget ads to support TV-style content that costs millions of dollars to produce or license.
“They won’t necessarily have less video,” he said. “They will have less expensive video.”