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Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Continues To Make Solid Progress, Earnings Report Says Otherwise (fool.com) 130

Posted by BeauHD from the low-expectations dept.
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.
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Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Continues To Make Solid Progress, Earnings Report Says Otherwise More

Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Continues To Make Solid Progress, Earnings Report Says Otherwise

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  • Doowylloh Accounting (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:03AM (#52540015) Homepage Journal

    If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

    • Re:Doowylloh Accounting (Score:5, Funny)

      by XxtraLarGe ( 551297 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:23AM (#52540113) Journal

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      Yeah, with these kinds of numbers, she's almost as bad as Baghdad Bob saying the Iraqis were in full control as American tanks were rolling by in the background.

      • Dude don't insult the Iraqis and Baghdad Bob.

      • I get the sentiment, but we've always got people crowing about corporations not taking the long view in favor of pumping up the next quarter's filing. What if the numbers from this 10-Q don't match what she's saying because Yahoo is looking farther than 3 months ahead?

        Given track record, it's unlikely, but still.

        • This isn't "we're making less profit because we're reinvesting", it's "we don't seem to have any money coming in". Unless I missed something in the article.

    • She is literary Yahoo's Minister of Information. [wikipedia.org]. She should be known as Yahoo Bob.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alomex ( 148003 )

      Yeah, I otherwise always trust CEOs and politicians. Marissa is the only one among them that I wouldn't trust. /sarcasm

    • Re:Doowylloh Accounting (Score:4, Informative)

      by I4ko ( 695382 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @11:52AM (#52541041)
      Well, she said solid progress, she didn't say in which direction. A solid progress towards the bottom is still a solid progress.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shoten ( 260439 )

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      Oh, come now. She's never been misleading in the slightest...I've seen the blood test by Theranos that proves it.

    • If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      I use yahoo mail! I prefer it to Gmail. Occasionally I will use Evolution to access both Y and G. I prefer Y because I don't have to give Google information about my life.

  • "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background). link [ycombinator.com]

    • Re:Yahoo the brand .. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @10:17AM (#52540349) Journal

      "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background).

      Say what you will about those ugly old websites, but at least they weren't tracking your every move and trying to upskirt your personal data for profit.

      • "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background).

        Say what you will about those ugly old websites, but at least they weren't tracking your every move and trying to upskirt your personal data for profit.

        LOL! No doubt!

        And this comes just one day after I said in a staff meeting how our corporate website looked "amateurish" because it uses a fairly saturated background color on most pages.

        Now maybe I think we should keep that look, and perhaps change the font to "Courier New"...

    • Read here [wikipedia.org] what a Yahoo really is.

      Yahoos are legendary beings in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

      Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver,

  • If Yahoo dies... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:09AM (#52540035) Journal

    I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.

    • Re:If Yahoo dies... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:16AM (#52540073)

      I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.

      Honest question: why do you consider it better to have Yahoo control your email than either Google or Microsoft? I mean aren't they all just variations on the same theme of evil-overload-corporation? I personally use Google for my email, not out of any strong conviction, more out of convenience.

      • Seriously.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lucm ( 889690 )

        Microsoft has always been more keen on respecting users privacy with webmail (they don't even show the origin ip in the header when you email someone) and outlook.com works well for casual emails, they make it easy to block/unsubscribe/search, and it's also easy to create email aliases so you don't share your real addresss with say, Papa johns or Amazon.

        However for some reason when you start using Office365 (the paid one) you're forced to use this crime against computing called Outlook Web, and it's 100% ho

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Get your own domain already. It's 2016, not 1996.

    • There are many more email services out there besides Microsoft and Google.

    • I'm the owner and maintainer of a _active_ mailing list on Yahoo.
      However I had no need to log on to my "Yahoo Account", so they canceled my Yahoo Account.
      I funnily still get the mails from that list.

      Not sure if I ever do anything Yahoo related again.

    • Try getting your own domain. You can host it for free at https://freedns.afraid.org/ [afraid.org] and then find a free mail provider. I have used https://www.zoho.com/ [zoho.com] for the past couple of years and been pleased with them. You could also skip the domain and just get your mail at Zoho (or where you get your free mail from). With Zoho you get a number of mail accounts with their free program so if you create your own domain you can have accounts for your family or friends.

  • What if they want to loose money... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What if yahoo was just a straw man put together to finance acquisitions so that a few could sell their worthless unicorns, then die slowly so that it did not attract too much attention. What a great exit strategy that would have been if actually architected and executed.

  • They need to sell off quickly. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:35AM (#52540153)

    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.

    • IMO making websites (and, in general, computer UIs) mobile/touch friendly has made them much worse.
      I understand the benefits of having a single UI for everyone but that leads to the least common denominator which include sparse UIs which tons of whitespace.
      That's forcing users of traditional PCs to use a UI that's worse that's not optimal for what their screen and input interfaces allow and that's worse than what they had before.
      I understand that the mobile devices are now a majority but, please can't w

  • So sorry to see Yahoo go down. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:38AM (#52540169) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Yeah the *Sponsored* content is awful.
    • Not to mention the fact that if one of your boxes (e.g., Spam or Trash) is empty, they now serve you video content which you can't block unless you completely block all scripts on the page, which makes it unusable. --At least, that last part is my experience.

  • Some value to Yahoo (Score:3)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:46AM (#52540211)
    There are some aspects of Yahoo that are worthwhile. Their groups are easy to run and maintain, and they have a sports section that beats the pants off of Disneyfied ESPN. And it is simple to get rid of the email ads, by just forwarding the email to your normal email program.

    The part that kills Yahoo is that they are around 50 percent clickbait, plus it seems they have an odd fixation on Kim Kardashian, the dumpster sex symbol. So I just link the sports, and stopped visiting the front page a good while back.

    • Can't fault them for picking up the last seasons of Community either.
    • The Ads and clickbait are how they make money. Without them the aspects have no value. Yahoo giving us features without them making money is why the company is tanking.

      • The Ads and clickbait are how they make money. Without them the aspects have no value. Yahoo giving us features without them making money is why the company is tanking.

        Yeah, but the mode of presenting them isn't working. This is like a parent who beats their child for every infraction, and steps it up with more intense beating. Eventually the beatings become lethal. So if the ads become a bigger pain in the ass, and people block them, but then they make tham more intrusive, leading to more blocking, then it fails. That's a positive feedback loop.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      There are some aspects of Yahoo that are worthwhile. Their groups are easy to run and maintain...

      That explains why after their latest Groups fiasco and the rumors of them being bought, alternative group content systems have been setup and groups are preparing to transfer all of their content to them.

      Let me be clear; Yahoo Groups are a total and complete disaster do to their "upgrades".

  • When they bought Tumblr I was like that is a TOTALLY good buy at a bargain of only $1,100,000,000. I mean, its like a website. What could have possibly have gone wrong? What geniuses they are over there.
  • They aren't hired for their solid grip on reality, they are hired because they are narcissistic types who will tell the shareholders what they want to hear regardless of the actual situation. She probably isn't even allowed to look at the books; it would be bad practice for any CEO to actually know the state of the company they are tasked with managing.

  • Uncle Rico? Is that you? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does anybody else feel like Yahoo has become the tech equivalent of Uncle Rico, from Napoleon Dynamite?

  • Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr â" its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer â" was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.

    30% of $1 billion is $300 million! Tumblr is worth $300 million!! Indeed a revelation!!!

    Ms Mayer made a miscalculation. If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft. Her competition Nadella is the poster child of mediocrity and she would have wiped the floor during CEO search.

    Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.

    • If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft.

      I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?

      Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.

      Talent can be situational which is why we have the Peter Principle [wikipedia.org]. She was good at her job at Google apparently but it doesn't automatically follow that her skill set will translate elsewhere. I'm willing to believe she is a talented person but that doesn't necessarily mean she is the right fit for a particular job. It also can depend heavily on the people you have around you. Maybe she had the right

      • I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?

        Half of the success is showing up, and she seems to be very good in that. She's talented to put up a show, may be like The Donald. There is no evidence of any particular skill other than the aura she projected which apparently fooled even people like you.

        There is not a single good decision I can think of she took when she was at Yahoo. What Yahoo needed was surgery and re-invention, a surgery which might have even killed the company. Instead what she gave was band-aid and placebo.

  • When they changed their website to the hideous, unusable pile of crap it is now I stopped visiting and contributing to their boards.

    I still have an account but never use it and only check Messenger once in a blue moon (which is also going away).

    You've dug your own hole, Marissa. You can't blame anyone else for Yahoo!'s failure.

    • What are you talking about? Marissa has been extremely successful. Look at how much she's getting paid.

      Whether Yahoo! fails or not is irrelevant. What's important is that Marissa has amassed a sizeable personal fortune. I wouldn't call that a "failure".

  • Nothing to see here, just a CEO stuffing her parachute a little more before jumping out of the plane and letting it go down in flames.

  • 1) Google "solid progress"

    2) The top hit is this article

    3) profit ???

    Nice work Marissa, here's that extra bonus for you!

    *google.co.uk was used for this demonstation

  • I'm a billionaire on a non-GAAP basis

  • Given the horrible design, layout, and execution of the parts of yahoo I visit, they have outsourced all of their web design to a guy living in a hut in India. About the only thing I hang onto yahoo for is fantasy sports. If my league ever folds, I'm outta there.

  • I am not sure they are really relevant any more. Their headline business, search, gets about 15 hits per day, and a third of them are typos for people thinking they want Yandex.

    I may be making up these statistics, or I may have gotten them thanks to an efficient yahoo search.

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