I wonder if they're optimising for profitability (while aiming to only keep user retention steady), or if this is really what the target users want.

I read anywhere that pages in japan are supposed to be chock full, you don't want any white space. Incidentally Yahoo Japan is very popular (although it does have different management, yahoo US only have as minority stake in it). There could be types of users elsewhere in the world who want the same kind of thing

Wow, it's horrible.

The way the logo is placed, it looks like an ad for another site.

The whole page is reminiscent of the adwords aggregation sites that grab the mis-typed domains of popular sites.

I also checked the site out for the first time in a while. My first thought: "This looks like AOL.com."

But of course I haven't been to AOL in forever either, maybe they've changed. So I checked them out too. Yep, can't tell the difference.

In 2007, TechCrunch had an article showing that AOL and Yahoo even had the same page layout: http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/26/aol-one-step-behind-again-n...

Ha, thought I'd have a look out of curiosity, the aol.com is actually far cleaner.

I agree. It's not just the homepage though. The whole site needs to be a little less cluttered.