At a time when much of the advertising industry is focusing on technology and data to reach ever more specific groups of consumers across the web, Yahoo has instead invested huge sums of money in content and talent geared to the mass market. “It becomes vanilla in a land of not 32, but 5,032 flavors,” said Rob Norman, the chief digital officer of WPP’s GroupM, the world’s biggest buyer of online advertising. “What Yahoo tried to do both with magazines and video was to be old media in the Internet age, and I suspect that that wasn’t the answer.” The result, advertisers say, is that Yahoo has gone out of fashion. And the money is moving away. Yahoo is predicted to take in about $3.4 billion in digital ad revenue this year, or only about 2 percent of the global digital ad market, down from 2.4 percent in 2014, according to eMarketer. - www.nytimes.com