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Yahoo Discussing Sale of Internet Business (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Yahoo!'s board of directors is considering the sale of their internet business in a series of meetings starting today. "Growing concerns around Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's lack of progress turning around Yahoo and an exodus of top executives have increased pressure on the company's board to consider her future and alternatives to her turnaround attempt, now in its fourth year. ... Much of the value of Yahoo's $31 billion market capitalization is tied up in two large Asian assets, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Its 15% stake in Alibaba is now worth about $32 billion, and its 35% stake in Yahoo Japan is now worth about $8.5 billion. Yahoo's cash and short-term investments totaled $5.9 billion at the end of the third quarter. That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free."
Its time for this internet institution to die.
Isn't that the whole thing? What else does Yahoo do?
Only service I use is email, and I use it somewhat grudgingly since I'm so entrenched (having used it for years). Guess it's time to start looking around.
Yahoo mail (and occasionally AOL mail) users are the only people I talk to who regularly note the capitalization of their email addresses. I find that reason enough for Yahoo to die.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
There is a good chance it actually is worth less than zero. Yahoo hasn't been relevant for a while now. Yahoo used to matter in search but that hasn't been true for a long time and as a result there is no real reason for most people to go to Yahoo anymore. It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
I hear a lot about this company named "Yahoo", but can someone explain me what they do ?
Maybe it is become I am European, but I have never used/seen/visited it, and I have been using the web for 20 years now...
To drive Yahoo into the ground.
Who would be willing to buy an asset worth less than zero?
I have been following Yahoo since their IPO, and I have never really been sure what they actually wanted to do (except to spend their pile of cash acquiring stuff). While Google has always seemed very focused in increasing their share of the search / information processing market, Yahoo (which started, remember, as What Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!, i.e., a web directory) was going to own search, then started using Google, then build their own (pretty bad) search engine after letting Google get big. That was pretty much par for the course. I can remember sitting through numerous presentations on this or that (Yahoo! Music!) where it seemed like the basic business model was "we will buy a promising startup, rebrand it as Yahoo and then let it die on the vine."
In other words, like a lot of Silicon Valley, they have made a lot of money, but it has been investor money, not actual revenue.
As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine.
I still remember those stupid commercials. "Ya-Hooooooo!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In the past two years (2013-2014) Marissa Mayer has been paid a total of $66 Million. And they just recently announced that they've hired a big consulting company to tell them how to run the business. So what exactly did they pay their CEO $66 Million for??
I call dibs to be her replacement!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So what exactly did they pay their CEO $66 Million for??
wizard of oz photo shoots
"so there's this .com that used to matter until they couldn't decide if they were a tech, media or advertising company"
"ya, who?"
"exactly!"
"no, who?"
"no, yahoo!"
"that's what I said"
"anyway, in a desperation hail mary they hired a hot chick who looked good in heels from the company who crushed them - it was mostly a pr stunt for the sjw crowd"
"ya, who?"
"no, google"
"what?"
"the company they hired her from"
"ya? who?"
"that's where she went"
"wtf are you talking about?!?"
"yahoo"
"THAT'S WHAT I'M ASKING!!!"
could go on for hours...
Since yahoo bought the entire backlog of SNL footage and has held it hostage for the past few years, if they DO go under....who will be the next company to grab it all up and hold it hostage?
This is being driven by an activist investor with no concern for the business, or jobs.
Allowing random people ownership of your business, who have no interest other than a quick score in the stock market, seems like a really strange way to run a business.
I've always said you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and notice little difference. No matter how badly a CEO fucks up a company they leave with a golden parachute.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That's news to me.
Yahoo should get out of Internet business long time ago
Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon, but unfortunately Yahoo did / does not seem to know what they want to do
When people offered webmail services (like hotmail, which was gobbled up by Microsoft) Yahoo started their own yahoo mail
Altavista offered search engine Yahoo also offer search engine
When Twocow offered file gathering / downloading service Yahoo followed suit ...
... et cetera
... et cetera
Even today Yahoo does not have a focus
It has a lab, and the lab people created a lot of neat and very useful stuffs ... and at the end, Yahoo kill almost all of those neat services
It wants to be like Google, except it doesn't know how to focus on selling ad spaces
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Why don't you Google it and find out?
Yahoo is/was famous (infamous?) for their email, portal, and search. They also have a few well known properties that aren't branded as Yahoo, such as Flickr. But all of these are Internet businesses. What, if anything, do they own that's not Internet? Isn't Yahoo minus Internet = -1?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion.
Agreed. It was remarkably stupid on the part of Groupon to turn that offer down. Obviously it's easy to say that in hindsight but I remember thinking these companies were stupid to turn down that kind of money which was clearly well beyond their current valuations.
There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
I've worked in M&A in years gone by. If the offers had been accepted they almost certainly would have gone through. Much of the due diligence was already done by the time the offer was made. The only thing that would have derailed them would be anti-trust concerns but those probably wouldn't have been a problem for either the Yahoo or Groupon deals.
Yeah, 'cos politicians have a long history of keeping election promises once in power. You can detect that is sarcasm, right?
Cringley says they should keep Alibaba and Yahoo Japan and sell everything else. That might not be a bad idea.
http://www.cringely.com/2015/11/30/soylent-green-now-made-with-more-women/
Does anyone actually "own" the internet?
I think NOT! So how could Yahoo sell something they don't own?
Just askin'
CAP === 'velocity'
It's a place to play fantasy football.
Right! It took until 2013 for ESPN to surpass Yahoo (Yahoo had 6,235,000 fantasy football players back then) in fantasy football players. Yahoo was into fantasy sports early, so they still have a huge user base. Yahoo has never correctly leveraged their fantasy sports base though. They did a crappy redesign a few years back that pissed off a lot of users. They've never added any new features that were meaningful. Yahoo also managed to ignore daily fantasy sports, up until this year while other companies have made a killing on them (DraftKings, FanDuel), and Yahoo's implementation has been less than impressive. Yahoo probably could have bought one of the DFS companies pretty cheaply two years ago, I've seen stats where DraftKings is making 2-4M a week on its NFL contests. DraftKings/Fanduel might have been a better investment than Yahoo buying Tumblr for 1.1 Billion and watching it never turn a profit.
.....build a wall greater than the great wall of China and make Mexico pay for it?
Americans should be ashamed a candidate like that is being taken seriously, never mind currently leading the Republican nomination.......
You could say the same sort of things about Microsoft. They weren't first to market with a graphical OS, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a TCP/IP stack, a browser, a game system, or a search engine. What measure of success they've had is due to bundling, network effects, marketing, and execution, not innovating.
-Dave
Someone has to hire the consultants. Do you think that just anyone can spend millions of dollars of their employer's money paying someone else to do their own job?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Reminds me of something Michael Dell said in 1997 about Apple.
Of course, Yahoo doesn't have a Steve Jobs to bring back, so perhaps that really would be the best thing to do.
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently? She took over a company in long term terminal decline. If I were her, and I were offered the job, I'd want a big ass salary too, because I'd be blamed for all the mistakes the predecessor made. And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When is the last time I used Yahoo! for anything?! It was before I switched to using AltaVista because I thought it was that much better. That's the time frame involved. I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo!. I just looked at their page. They're still going after the "Internet Portal" thing, apparently; it's cluttered and claims to offer everything under the sun, but does it in a way that makes me click, click, click and seems entirely geared toward reading and content consumption.
It's like they're stuck before social media, mobile, and HTML 5. Feels very "Web 1.0" (though I hate that silly term).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wow! Way to cherry-pick your examples. The first two recent ones in the news that you could think of, obviously.
Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay (from Wikipedia):
"Whitman joined eBay on March 1998, when it had 30 employees and revenues of approximately $4 million. During her time as CEO, the company grew to approximately 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue by 2008."
Marissa Meyer is not competent, in my opinion.
I've been typing 'yahoo.com' into my address bar for years. Many years ago, when my servers and my internet connection were less reliable, I always used Yahoo as a test to see if my connection was live. Yahoo servers rarely went down.
I still go to Yahoo about once a week, just as a reflex when my browser has an issue.
Have you seen their homepage lately? Evidently the Kardashians are REALLY popular with the Yahoo! demographic. The Yahoo! homepage is a mess of celebrity crap.
I've been wondering if this is what will happen when women control the Internet. More Kardashians...
No reason to lie.
Some people pay for public attention. Headlines 5 and 6 from today's Yahoo home page:
Khloé Kardashian Admits Sheâ(TM)s Had a One-Night Stand
Kylie Jenner Admits She Only Has TWO Friends
I haven't used Yahoo since I switched to AltaVista. That's a long, long time ago.
Just loaded up their homepage. It looks like they're still trying to do the "Internet Portal" thing, it's all very, very texty, tries to cover every last topic, requires multiple clicks, and seems social and mobile unfriendly. Like they're stuck in 2001 or something.
I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo. I can't think of a use case for using Yahoo. The "Internet Homepage" model just isn't something that people do any longer. Even "web search" is really outdated; I work for a SaaS platform these days and most of our users just enter keywords into their Google widget on their mobile device, and they only do that when they want to learn something about something.
For day-to-day workflows and tasks, well... there's an app for that (whatever it happens to be). Seems like Yahoo is an epoch behind.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm surprised by how much stupidity and hatred there is of Yahoo on here.
Sure, most /.'ers are not yahoo users, but that does not make yahoo any less important for /. types. The death of yahoo would mean more conformity on the net, and more power consolidated into Google or Microsoft. Less options for users, less competition, and less potential for innovation. It's the same shit going on with web browsers as everyone becomes Chromed'
Also the lack of information about what you guys know about yahoo amazes me. It's a $4billion dollar per year in revenue internet company (not including its investments.) They do more than just mail. IN fact they're leaders in some segments, such as their Finance portal. I'd expect more knowledge from slashdotters. Reminds me this place is going down hill as well.
But yes, looking at their cash flow statements (On Yahoo Finance, funny enough) yahoo is in a decline. Since screwing up their sell off to microsoft, it looks like the best course of action would be to split up into 4 parts and try to spin or sell these off.
The games section, along with fantasy sports could be pitched to a few mobile gaming companies, pogo, or other web gaming companies. This segment could be killed if there are no buyers.
News and Content, including Finance, Weather, Sports and Lifestyle crap (Beauty, parenting, health etc.) is actually fairly solid. They're a online 5 news source in the USA. They could probably fetch a good premium, but even if they can't find a buyer, this part of yahoo could survive on their own.
Community/Social stuff, Mail, Flickr, Tumblr, IM (if it still exists) should be sent off for a buyer. Mass mail systems are hard to design and run properly. So it is worth something to anyone looking to jump into an existing multi-million user base. I doubt this company could survive on it's own without integrating into parent company which will utilize it better.
The final bit is the investment side of things. Yahoo it self should become a holding company for Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, use the proceeds from selling off assists to invest in new companies, and make sure they own some shares of anything they spin off (News section.) $5-$6 billion is a lot to work with. It can buy good amount of chunks in startups/small businesses looking to grow.
Portals are dead, Yahoo was the last major portal. It's a shame really, but not surprising. Specialization typically creates a better product, trying to do too many thing under one hat erodes quality. Just look at Google and Microsoft products.
Mobile is slowly killing M$, don't worry. Android will take over the world with a small island of Apple snobs.
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
Really? I think it's a piece of crap and the temperatures and predictions it gives are routinely wrong. I have several other weather apps because it is fairly useless and it's predictions are generally the worst of any weather app on my phone.
I had suggested this on a previous occasion, but will repeat: Yahoo should sell its internet business to Apple. That is the one missing thing that Apple doesn't have - unlike Google and Bing. And don't be too greedy on the price - just sell it to Apple at whatever they pay you
I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently?
Hard to say. The company does make pretty substantial profits and they have quite a lot of cash. The problem the company doesn't really seem to have organic growth prospects and they don't dominate an important segment like Google does with search or Apple does with devices. Yahoo just doesn't seem to have a focus to the company and I'm not sure anyone would be able to easily fix that.
And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
That is among the dumbest business decisions of all time. The board should have pimp slapped him when he didn't want to sell the company for such a staggeringly large amount of money. I can't stand Microsoft either but if they want to buy my company for way more than it is really worth I'd take the money and run.
Tough crowd in here today.
You guys sure make Yahoo sound like the new AOL. Hence, AOL must be the new compuserve.
Yipee! I can now use my old aol email accounts w/o feeling shamed!
Add Meg Whitman to that - has she been doing any better? I'm trying to think of any good female CEO, but even Jill Barad of Mattel was a disaster.
But how has she been doing at HP?
Wrong.
Both Yahoo and AltaVista were founded in 1995 with AltaVista dong search and Yahoo offering a curated directory. Yahoo didn't start offering search results outside its own directories until 2000 and they used Google. Yahoo never had its own search engine until after they bought Inktomi in 2003, the same year they bought AltaVista. After the Inktomi purchase, they used the technology in their own engine (which had been in development for several years) and began offering the results in 2004. In 2013, Yahoo retired its search engine and switched to Microsoft Bing.
Microsoft has a core business, Yahoo does not. It is just a series of websites they have acquired through purchases over the years. Its old curated directories no longer exist and the company is nowhere close to a market leader in what it does pretend to do. The largest value of Yahoo is ownership of stock in two public companies, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (which is majority owned by SoftBank). Effectively, they are a holding company.
Obviously to build a playpen for her baby and cut their remote workers.
My mother is a staunch democrat and loves the guy. It's jaw dropping. Ever since Obamacare screwed her medical bills she hasn't been the same and it is jaw dropping to see her supporting a guy like Trump. She doesn't even care about the gaffs. She just wants things to get done and she's sick of how weak her political party has become.
It's troubling to see people asking for the internet search business to have one less competitor. Less competition is always a bad thing for the consumer. Hell, google already gets away with pretty much any breach of privacy, data mining, remote software execution, etc. they like. Imagine them when there are no other options in terms of web search and related services?
Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon
Fucking hell, how young are you?
Pre-Google Yahoo had one of the top web directories available. It was manually curated and therefore doomed to failure, but they were for a while a market leader.
Didn't last long though, admittedly. Wouldn't let that malware infested shitfest anywhere near one of my browsers these days.
They already stopped being a competitor in the search engine business when they subbed the task out microsoft "bing!"
Only I can judge you.
Blowjobs.
It's a good example of the principle: "A-level people hire A-level people. B-level people hire C-level people".
Now Google has lost focus... Witness Alphabet and relegating Google Search to a subordinate
First things first: discussed negative valuation of the core is result of other valuations and their subtraction. All these valuations are largely approximate to allow for any reasonable conclusion in quantitive terms. Therefore casuistical nature of this must be nailed down first off.
Then, company in quite substantial extent follows Google model of presence on net and its sophistication. Allright, in less extravagant fashion, but with lesser part of failing attempts at exotic activities as well. Presence on net is important by itself, it is itself chunk of the pie. I am user of Yahoo services and their client, like many others are. It is huge potential base for the future, it cannot be valued below zero just for the fact.
Yes, they are not that bold and trendy perhaps, but they are solid - which is important (even ambitious Microsoft does NOT have that decent reputation, sorry) - and they managed to own Alibaba, that is only one modest corner of the net and its future. More is definitely to come, no doubt in that. If Yahoo has presence, they as well may continue owning more of such.
Finally, it is greatly stretched to cite Yahoo as Altavista killer or what. Everybody knows what search method made it obsolete. Actually, I do use Yahoo search engine in the process of fishing some cached content, not present somewhere elsewhere - again, being present with unique resources is sufficient ground of serving your portion of clients in the future as well, likely expanding where becomes possible.
Servant of karma
I've always seen people use either google.com or in some cases, even microsoft.com for this purpose
I still have a mail account with them as a recyclable throwaway, so I know who they are, but I'd probably even ditch Google if their start page was as cluttered as Yahoo's.
Yahoo games used to be one of the most popular places to play a ton of board game clones, but Yahoo snubbed mobile devices for years. What makes this extra mystifying is that almost all of their games were written in Java, and most mobile devices support Java. Why weren't they ported?
History was recently repeated when several shows such as Community were purchased to promote Yahoo's video streaming service, "Yahoo Screen". But the apps and Chromecast support didn't exist until the season was almost over, and they were far from polished. Even the web interface is perplexing.
--Yahoo News is worth saving IMHO, but yahoo email got deprecated in my case pretty fast when they started doing Teh Stupid -- like getting rid of multi-tabbed email, datamining your private messages to serve ads, farting around with forced password changes, and now the latest - *blocking webmail entirely* for "a limited number of users" that use AD BLOCKERS. F'-d up Epic Stupidity there. It's like they're purposely trying to kill the experience.
--I'm unhappy cuz yahoo was a primary email account for me since ~1997. Gmail is just OK but there's no really good free alternatives out there that I've found except for maybe Inbox.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??