Yahoo announces plans to kill off some regional news sites, sunsets Yahoo Classic Games, alerts, and profile sites

Today Yahoo released an updated product report for 2014, which highlights the closure of several regional sites.

Yesterday the company shut down regional homepages in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Chile. Users trying to access these sites will be redirected to Yahoo’s general Spanish language homepage. The report also notes that regional Yahoo News and Celebrity pages in Greece, Romania, and South Africa will sunset on Dec. 22. Yahoo will also be killing off websites like Yahoo News, Yahoo SHE, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo OMG, and Yahoo Entertainment for users in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

In addition to regional homepages, Yahoo announced the demise of Arabic news site Maktoob Forums; public profile site profile.yahoo.com; online gaming site Yahoo Classic Games; content subscription service alerts.yahoo.com; and Open Cascade, an IMAP service for developers. Yahoo will also be discontinuing Yahoo-customized mail APIs in February of 2015, but a new IMAP service will launch in early 2015, according to the announcement.

The closure of Yahoo’s regional and genre-specific sites seems counterintuitive to its overall mission. Last quarter, the company said it planned to refine its personalized content offerings to better serve its audience. However, shutting down products is nothing new for Yahoo. The company says it has closed more than 60 products and services in the last two years in order to help narrow its focus as a company.