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Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Continues To Make Solid Progress, Earnings Report Says Otherwise (fool.com)
tomhath quotes a report from Fool: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer tried to emphasize the progress that the company has made. "We continue to make solid progress against our 2016 plan," Mayer said, and "in addition to our efforts to improve the operating business, our board has made great progress on strategic alternatives." The CEO argued that the results met or exceeded the company's own guidance. Yahoo! was able to post a revenue increase by changing the ways that it presents revenue related to its search agreement with Microsoft, and without that change, adjusted revenue of $1.055 billion was down 15% from the year-ago quarter. That was even worse than the 13% drop investors were expecting, and adjusted EBITDA fell by more than a third. That resulted in adjusted net earnings of $0.09 per share, missing the consensus forecast by a penny but also glossing over a $440 million net loss on a GAAP basis. The company took a $395 million goodwill impairment charge and an $87 million intangibles impairment charge related to its Tumblr unit, determining that the fair value of the division is less than the amount indicated on Yahoo!'s balance sheet. It was also revealed that Yahoo is writing down the value of its Tumblr acquisition by $482 million, citing lower projections for the social network's future performance, according to a report from CNNMoney. Last quarter, the company took a $230 million write-down on its Tumblr acquisition. Since Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, Yahoo has written down more than half of its value.
I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Yahoo has some valuable web properties, but they're hurting themselves badly lately.
Take for instance Yahoo Finance. It's the largest, in terms of users, finance site online. Roughly 200m unique people. Many of them (including my self) are daily users for almost 2 decades. In using Yahoo Finance you typically use some other properties of yahoo, such as Email (required for an account), message boards, news (linked from the main page and from individual company information.), and video (which is forced down your throat in the last 2-3 years.)
That's worth quite a bit of money, in fact I'd say it's one of the few properties left that yahoo hasn't screwed up in 30 years... until last week. You see, the site layout for Yahoo Finance hasn't changed in 20 years. Sure there have been a few new things here and there, but for the most part it was a simple, easy to load page, with LOTS of information on a single page or two.
However a while back they merged Sports, Entertainment, and Finance into the same department. Probably because Yahoo wanted for a time to become a media company. Sports and Entertainment got a make over to make them more Mobile/web3.0 friendly. Large amounts of white space, infinite scrolling, minimal amount of interface/links, etc. They finally got around to doing it to Yahoo Finance. Only problem this sort of thing doesn't work for the type of people who use finance. As such it has been critically panned by pretty much everyone, it's completely useless, and seems to be designed by people who have zero financial literacy, or at the very least don't understand the basics/needs of financial markets. Nearly everyone is flocking to other sites which provide nearly the same amount of functionality as the old Yahoo Finance, including myself, my father, and a number of friends.
Bit of a long rant, but Yahoo is eroding their own value. And its their own fault. Yahoo Finance and properties linked to it imo were about the only positive web properties Yahoo held. (Same could be said for Sports, and there is an over lap for most of those properties.)
They just need to spin off their Baba holdings, and takes Verizon's billion dollar offer and be done with it. It'll be bad for the internet, but it's about the only good business decision they have left unless someone has a better offer on the table.
I went and looked at the Yahoo home page and it is terrible. It is like the National Enquire vomited on People magazine not to mention the sponsored links. They need some quality control IMHO or maybe I am just not their target.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.