From a business perspective (he says having no business experience or expertise), Yahoo is a collection of assets: Code, people, branding, community. They aren't in first place, and they aren't profitable at the moment, but I think the case that they have zero or negative value is a bit simplistic.
Put it another way: Would you rather throw a pile of money at trying to build a collection of code, talent, business contracts, and users from scratch, or would you rather buy an EXISTING collection, on the cheap, and work instead to flip it into a profitable business? Both are risky ventures, but everything I've seen says it's harder to build from scratch than it is to keep existing users.
Perhaps your answer is that you'd prefer to build it from scratch, but do you see why - if the answer takes some thought to determine - that someone else might come to a different conclusion?
Heck, even if you want to completely toss the business model - even if you want to toss everything they've done and what they are trying to do - I'd imagine the servers, in-house expertise, and collected code and utilities, not to mention any purchased or licensed software, would make Yahoo worth considering as an acquisition.
You don't need to grow to provide a decent dividend to shareholders. You just need to reliably produce a profit. If your dividend represents an acceptable ROI it doesn't particularly matter if you are not growing.
Of course having a good dividend AND capital growth would be desirable but shareholders won't complain too loud about a company that just spits out dividends year after year.
That's patently false. Pun intended. Innovation is not limited to startups. Underneath the hood, there's an absolutely massive amount of r&d and innovation that goes into Intel's chips year on year. Google's progress in machine learning for speech and photos is impressive. The big companies often do very well innovating. Intel producing another innovation that drives a billion dollars of sales isn't as exciting as a startup doing the same, but both are real.
You're talking about the economy in a "Plinko chip" sort of way, and I'm talking about community building. If you want good products and a well paying society, you need to promote more individual nodes rather than giant motherships. And by "promote", I mean actually want it instead of talking about how the rules apply to the current system.
You zoomed in on a quarter, which is not a good way to look at it. From an annual standpoint, they have been profitable for each of the last 4 years, excluding 2015. 2015 Included a massive impairment of goodwill (which is not a cash expense) at $4.4B[0] and would have otherwise been profitable.
Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else.
But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on.
There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as their default homepage ten years ago.
You can hear the fail in their words. They're talking about retaining users, not offering value. They still want to be a portal (ie the base of every action you take), something users didn't want when it was new.
That's the business legacy you'd have to reverse before you stop producing negative-value, let alone actually produce something that may actually be valuable.
My understanding is that's the one thing that is not up for sale these days, and that all relevant discussions are regarding the spinoff of their core web businesses.
A fair number of people use Yahoo mail and Yahoo search. It's not a majority of the market by any means, but it's still tens to hundreds of millions of users all told.
I don't know how monetizable it is, but yahoo groups is still very actively used. It's amazing the number of times I'm trying to find information about a bit of software or hardware, and find myself landing on a yahoo groups archive.
Yep. I regularly use http://finance.yahoo.com/ and http://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy/ when in season. The finance site is one of the better ones. Google has not updated theirs in so long I'm surprised they have not just turned it off.
slight variation: I was talking about Yahoo ABSENT the profitable sub-groups. The part that apparently has negative value.
I fail to believe that Yahoo, minus Ali Baba and Fantasy sports and similar bits, is actively NEGATIVE value. It might be poorly run and have the poor actions you're talking about. (okay, it DOES have the negatives you mention).
That doesn't mean what's there "should just die" - it's a business opportunity to take that and use it profitably.
MySpace was bought for exactly that reason. It has a large enough number of returning monthly visitors (accessing archived photos and what not) for that data to be valuable to the adtech vendor that bought it. If you're looking to acquire lots and lots of customer data, there are far cheaper ways to go about it than trying to build your own social network from scratch.
Except for Finance and maybe Tumblr, aren't all these services fading ?
* Yahoo Answers
Quora ( 100M users [1] ) and Stack Exchange is now the default question & answer sites.
* Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports
Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google.
* Yahoo mail
Gmail ( 1B users [3] and grew 100 Million users just last year )
* Flickr
Google Photos ( 100M users in 5 months [4] )
It seems like Google Finance is losing [5] as they see it as part of search but it appears there is a need for a good separate product here. Tumblr looks to be a runaway success ( 227 million registered accounts, more than double the number of accounts a year prior and more than 37 million unique visitors [6]), no match for Wordpress yet ( WordPress.com records 126M unique visitors per month [7] ), but the social aspects looks to work in Tumblr's favor.
> Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google.
Yahoo Sports is a lot more than just sports news and scores. The traffic is heavily driven by fantasy sports, which Google doesn't have.
They run a whole bunch of really useful services. Their personalized homepage is still great.
If they would just maintain what they've got and stop swinging for the fences - turn into something like the Apache Foundation was in their early years - they'd provide a lot of value for a lot of people.
This community often seems to think that something is dead just because people don't use it in SCs or in startups, completely forgetting the average person. By their logic Windows is dead, Oracle is dying etc. the only successful companies are Google and Apple.
