It should be noted that Yahoo owns 20% of Alibaba. With Alibaba announcing its IPO plans earlier this year, yahoo's stake is worth between $13B to $18B. Most of the share price increase is because of this. Not because Yahoo's core business has gotten better. Yahoo is worth $31B today. So almost 1/3 to 1/2 of Yahoo's valuation is its stake in Alibaba. In 2008, nobody knew how big Alibaba would get.
This is what should scare investors, look at the link below and you realize that Yahoo is a leader in none of their business. Google leads search, Facebook leads social, Twitter realtime news & events etc. http://everything.yahoo.com/
They have a big bowl of goo right now. I was impressed with Marissa's stats during her Disrupt interview but a few days ago, i took a look at their business and they just have a bunch of mediocre properties with lots of link bait. This is how they getting so many views, a lot of gossip, lifestyle, tv clips. Even in the gossip side, tmz & others beat them there. Dan Loeb is a smart guy, he jumped out at the right time. I like Yahoo and hope they come up with something that they dominate. They destroyed their research departments, which were one of the best in the world and now when the market moves towards more intelligent backends as devices get smaller, they are stuck fighting for weather and gossip market space.
At the time they felt very strongly about it. The employees were adamant about the fact that they had a certain way of doing things and they were concerned that Microsoft would disrupt whatever it was they had.
I don't know if it was the right thing for either party, but that's what happened.
Berkshire Hathaway, at $175,000 per share, would have set that record long ago, except the S&P has some fairly arbitrary rules that exclude it. Point being, stock price means nothing.
Inflation has more to do than with overt quantitative easing. Also, share price has no direct correlation to overall valuation; you have to throw in the number of shares and multiply.
Yay, let's celebrate the underperforming. I suspect many Yahoo investors would rather have had their $31 5 years ago so they could have invested it in something that would actually grow.
Though, at least they've had better results than the MSFT investors.
bought yhoo at 26 usd, set a limit at 31, excellent!
i really believe in what melissa meyer's doing for the company, though i dont see them in the same vein as google, more so an online media company, not in terms of a true innovator which is fine because if you get that right, there's plenty of money to be made, buy!
One interesting bit of Yahoo news. Yahoo in Australia is partnering with Adwords rather than Bing Ads. Wouldn't surprise me if all of Yahoo went that way once their contract with Microsoft is up.
Despite all the effort it doesn't really feel like Bing Ads is on the map compared to Adwords.
Just wondering, how many people use Yahoo? It's supposed to be getting more popular but at least with my peers I don't see that trend. Is it popular outside of the USA?
They were kind of the definitive site for general information in the 90s, so many millions of people who started using the internet in the 90s got used to going there for news, sports, finance, weather, and some of their other verticals, as well as things like email.
A lot of those people haven't had any good reason to switch to anything else, so that's what they use. This tracks with the way people choose offline brands like toothpaste and such -- once people get used to buying a brand, most of them tend to stick with it until they have a clear reason to change.
That's actually why the transition to mobile is so crucial for them -- those people still want to keep up with sports and weather and everything else on their phones, but they're more likely to use an app than a website. If Yahoo loses their userbase in the transition to mobile, those users are probably never coming back.
Yahoo Sports is an excellent site, I go there multiple times a day.
You asked about international: the (mostly independent) Yahoo Japan is huge and always has been; my wife and many of her friends use it as their homepage.
I would never have considered Yahoo in the past, but recently Google has been on a crusade to make their products worthless to me so I've been looking around to see what else is out there. I've settled on Bing maps, though OSM is what I'd like to end up using eventually. I suspect at least a few other people are doing the same, and some of them might be settling on Yahoo products.
I read a while back that they are #1 or #2 in email services. Gmail may have surpassed them, but they're still in the top 3 along with Hotmail. Email is a great tool for customer retention.
Yahoo has a pretty huge portfolio of sites that fit in that bucket compared with googles many(but in honesty generally unpopular outside of search and email) offerings.
I'm guessing it's popular amongst people who install software that in turn installs a yahoo search toolbar on them that they cannot figure out how to turn off/don't bother to.
Apparently Yahoo is the "2nd largest search directory on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%".
- First of all, wow, what a landslide!
- Secondly, Yahoo still has a pretty big slice of that pie relative to everyone else.
- Super surprising that Google owns 85% of the search market, yet is still behind Yahoo on traffic :/
AAPL, GOOG, etc will reach their plateau soon enough. Apple already has flat or worse y/y earnings, Google is on steroids and is ruining their brand to artificially increase their earnings by penalizing sites (advertise or no traffic) and making it all ads in certain sectors. It will last maybe another or two. What then?
The point I was making: large tech companies have different rules, they behave more like Exxon and PG then a recently IPO-ed Google or Microsoft.
There is no legitimate business-based excuse for Yahoo! to have turned down Microsoft's offer. Yang et al had to fight tooth and nail to keep it from being executed, and that opposition was obviously based purely on ideology: not wanting to become part of the MS behemoth. I don't believe any informed person seriously thought that Yahoo!'s choice to not only forgo but actively prevent Microsoft's buyout had anything to do with anything else.
Yang et al had to fight tooth and nail to keep it from being executed, and that opposition was obviously based purely on ideology: not wanting to become part of the MS behemoth
And not wanting to sorta admit defeat. That's why companies have boards, to do what is best for shareholders not for founders still thinking they got it. Yahoo's loss = Microsoft's gain.
The price goes back and forth, but right now I don't see yahoo leading anything, maybe just online answers. So it's part Marissa euphoria and part Alibaba stake.
