Yehey to go IPO?

Yehey to go IPO?

The Inquirer reports that local internet portal Yehey is going for an initial public offering (IPO) around middle of this year.

I was surprised actually as Yehey seems to be silent all these years and hasn’t made any news in the local industry. I noticed they’ve diversified too and have been spotted to gain some momentum in the message board (forums) arena, though some inside info tells me they’re just hosting these huge forums for free and there’s not much at stake in the tie-ups.

Not sure what an IPO would get them but it sure is an interesting development to watch out for.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

7 Comments

pinoymoneytalk says:

18 years ago

Abe,

An IPO would give Yehey cash that can enable them to expand operations more. Probably they want to aggressively push Yehey PayPlus (again)? The mainstream market may now be ready for this technology as more Pinoys get wired and earn more money (due to the booming economy and the continuous OFW diaspora).

As for the forum tie-ups, I think Yehey just wants to secure traffic to its site and ad space for its ad inventory. I may be wrong but I don’t think a lot of Pinoys would choose to visit Yehey given that they can use Google for search and Inquirer, Yahoo and Yahoo Philippines for Philippine-related information. The tie-ups ensure that traffic trickles down from the sponsored forums to Yehey.com and that the ad space Yehey sells are in sites where there is traffic (without the tie-up forums, ad space would be limited to just the main Yehey site).

PinoyMoneyTalk.com
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Miguel says:

18 years ago

And then the Yehey! site and marketing material are all revisionist… they say that they started in 1996, but they didn’t say who.. it was originally Alistair Israel, Dave Quitoriano and friends.

Of course they didn’t say that Yehey! started as a colocated Windows NT box (or 2) in my ISP :)
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keekai says:

18 years ago

Yehey going IPO wasn’t really one of their biggest secret :P
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Miguel says:

18 years ago

Well, portals going IPO sounds so 90’s.
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Direkngyehey says:

18 years ago

Hi,

Good points. Actually, we are going IPO for many reasons: from gaining more cash for other investments, to becoming a global online media behemoth.

Yehey has undergone a transformation since last year, starting with its facelift and relaunch, and the introduction of Kaban (www.kaban.com.ph) which replaced Payplus, to becoming a formidable marketing tool for business.

For our users, we have introduced a rewards system called bretas. The more you search or navigate yehey, the more points you earn, and you can redeem it later for goodies.

I guess PinoyMoneyTalk is right in the sense that we have become too hybrid. What is our positioning anyway? For now, we are happy being home for Pinoys in and out of the Philippines. We deliver aggragated content, have a good message boards and chatroom activities, new channels and sections, and definitely, more interactive features. But we will see how it goes.

If you have ideas, please let us know. Thanks.
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