Happy Birthday, Yahoo: 15 Years Old Today

Although its web site launched in 1994, Yahoo is celebrating its 15th birthday today — that’s in honor of the company being incorporated on March 1, 1995.

The story of Yahoo’s founding is well known: Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of web sites originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” and renamed “Yahoo” in 1994. Yang and Filo, in fact, reminisce about the company they created in a blog post tonight on the Yahoo corporate blog:

“After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.”

Yahoo has posted a company timeline in its Flickr account, and has also announced a 15th birthday trivia challenge that will begin at 8:00 am PT tomorrow (March 2nd) via the official Yahoo Twitter account.