July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo and mobile. We’ve been hearing for months now that Yahoo wants to focus on mobile. But during the company’s earnings call today, did that focus shine?

Late last year, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told techsters her big gameplan for the company: Making Yahoo accessible and relevant to a mobile-first culture.

What we’ve seen from Mayer so far as Yahoo’s latest CEO, we’ve liked. She’s been tough (notably on workers-from-home), but her choices have been rational and good for the bottom line. She’s focused on engineering and technology over media and restructuring deals. And she’s brought in some really good talent.

But on the mobile side, has Yahoo come far enough? Let’s take a look at the specifics.

If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em

In today’s earnings call, Mayer highlighted a string of acquisitions: Snip.it, Alike, Jybe, and Summly. These buys were brokered “to build world-class technology and engineering teams in mobile and personalization,” the company said in its earnings statement.

Summly, in particular, was a coordinated effort to get on-trend mobile IP and talent on Yahoo’s team. The app was a gorgeously simple interface that sums up news articles — an ideal way for Yahoo to accomplish Mayer’s stated goal of bringing Yahoo’s wealth of content to mobile interfaces.

The company has stated that it integrate Summly’s product into Yahoo’s mobile offerings.

While we can’t yet see the total effects of these acquisitions and acqui-hires, we do like the direction the company is taking, cherry-picking small teams and products that look and feel modern, fresh, and young.

Responsive mobile design

Other changes, the company stated, revolved around design. The revamped, pared-down Yahoo.com homepage was built with smartphones and tablets in mind.

As part of the redesign, a few mobile-friendly features popped up. First, tons of content and navigation disappeared, giving the whole thing a cleaner, simpler look — a necessity for smaller screens. Second, the homepage got infinite scrolling to give on-the-go users a quick, easy way to get more news and content.

Yahoo Mail got a facelift, too, with new mobile apps that put it in the ring with Outlook, another aging contender that’s keeping its services fresh-looking and up-to-date with younger products.

As unpopular as we in the thick of tech might think Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo homepage are, they’re still Yahoo’s biggest products, and as such, its best hope for increasing revenues from advertising.

The ax

On the quieter side of its corporate news, Yahoo is slowing starting to get rid of some of its mobile apps. Mayer has previously stated that 12 or so applications is the right number for the company to continue to develop and support; the rest are just clutter.

Right now, the company has around 20 apps for iPhone and Android — everything from a dedicated application for cricket to the fairly standalone Flickr to a completely confusing television app called IntoNow.

Some of those application will need to be killed off, especially if Yahoo wants to crank out more and better apps in the months to come.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, mobile formats are still listed as a risk on Yahoo’s books, especially when it comes to “acceptance by users of new products and services (including, without limitation, products and services for mobile devices and alternative platforms).”

And while Yahoo’s stock price has been on a slow but steady rise, its revenues are still in a shaky mode as various parts of the company’s income slow their losses bit by bit or increase their growth ever so slightly. Yahoo is a big ship, and it’s going to take a while to turn the entire brand and business around.

While we did see evidence that Mayer & co. are making every effort to do better at mobile with a great new look and feel for key products and some awesome acquisitions, it may still be a while before the world thinks of Yahoo as a mobile-focused company. But we’ll wait and see what launches, features, and UIs appear over the summer; we have a feeling Yahoo’s mobile best is yet to come.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/Flickr

It’s too early to declare whether iconic tech company Yahoo is in full turnaround mode, but the company’s first quarter 2013 earnings certainly show it’s headed in the right direction.

“Our growth strategy will depend on our ability to build, buy, and partner,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said during the Q1 2013 earnings call today.

Yahoo brought in $1.14 billion in revenue for the quarter with earnings per share of $0.35 — beating Wall Street’s estimates of $1.1 billion on $0.25 earnings per share. (That’s not quite as high as research firm eMarketer predicted, as VentureBeat reported last month.) The company’s advertising revenue continued to drop, but at a slower rate compared to previous quarters. Display revenue ex-TAC was $402 million for the quarter (11 percent decrease compared to $454 million a year ago), and the number of ads sold dropped 7 percent compared to Q1 2012. It’s search revenue definitely fared better, but Yahoo still has quite a journey ahead of it.

Mayer continued to highlight the company’s stance, noting how active it’s been over the last three months. Yahoo picked up several companies, including acquihire Jybe and its big purchase of Summly, not to mention those rumors about a Dailymotion buyout. The company also redesigned its homepage, overhauled its Yahoo Mail service, and shuttered a ton of underperforming services and applications in favor of polishing up those that are doing well.

Yahoo’s stock was down slightly to $23.79 at market close, and it slid to $22.78 per share in after-hours trading.

Yahoo might see significant growth for the first time in years, with analysts predicting net ad revenues rising by 3.2 percent to a total of $3.28 billion for 2013.

Ad and marketing research firm eMarketer is also forecasting growth in Yahoo’s search marketing revenues: up by 7 percent to $1.23 billion for 2013.

When it comes to display ads, Yahoo has actually been posting negative numbers in years past. eMarketer expects that to turn around for the first time in 2013, with Yahoo posting one percent display revenue growth this year and increasing that growth to four percent by 2015.

Granted, the online and search ad market is growing at a greater rate than Yahoo’s gains, and companies like Google and Facebook are posting truly killer year-over-year numbers. All this means that while Yahoo’s bottom-line numbers will grow, its share of the domestic online ad market will decrease, shrinking to just 6.2 percent. For contrast, Google claims more than 72 percent of the total online ad spend in the United States.

But as eMarketer points out, 2012 was the first time in several years that Yahoo posted such revenue gains at all, and that trend continuing through 2013 is a very good sign.

“eMarketer … remains bullish about Yahoo!’s display business and expects growth in 2013 and 2014 as the company removes clutter and increases prices with higher-quality inventory,” a rep stated via email.

In terms of display ad revenue, eMarketer expects newcomers like Twitter to post dwindling returns while Yahoo makes a slow but steady comeback and Google continues to hold steady at around 35 percent growth year-over-year for the foreseeable future.

Other signs Yahoo is staging a comeback: a string of splashy acquisitions (the Dailymotion buyout, the Jybe acquihire, and then Summly) , a new data center and added jobs, and CEO Marissa Mayer’s zero-tolerance policy on WFH slackers, underperforming mobile apps, and cluttered homepages.

Overall, Yahoo’s stock price has gone up around 48 percent since Mayer took the CEO’s seat and is currently trading at $23.54:

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Once endlessly depressing Yahoo is showing new signs of life after releasing its Q4 2012 earnings, with the company’s stock price getting nearly a 5 percent increase to $21.32 per share in after-hours trading at peak.

The company struggled to stay afloat during 2012, which began with a rough shakeup of its executive team and a handful of new CEOs (interim and otherwise). But shareholders are mostly pleased with the Yahoo’s direction under newly minted CEO Marissa Mayer, pushing the company’s stock price above $20 for the first time since 2008.

Mayer’s strategy includes doubling down on mobile development, revitalizing properties like Flickr, and in acquiring smaller companies that provide value to the overall business — specifically in advertising tech, Mayer said during the Q4 earnings call. She indicated that Yahoo has about “a dozen” products that are in need of a major revamp.

Mayer’s also stacking her team with lots of new executives and changing the company’s overall culture to match her old stomping grounds at Google.

“During the quarter we made progress by growing our executive team, signing key partnerships including those with NBC Sports and CBS Television, and launching terrific mobile experiences for Yahoo! Mail and Flickr,” Mayer said in the earnings report. “At the same time, we achieved tremendous internal transformation in the culture, energy and execution of the company.”

The strategy seems to be enough to convince shareholders that Mayer is moving in the right direction after her first full quarter as chief exec despite some so-so earnings numbers.

Yahoo’s fourth quarter saw revenue increase about 2 percent from the same period last year to $1.35 billion, and it stayed flat for the year. However, the company’s profit dipped for the quarter to $272 million compared to $297 million during the same period last year. The quarter also saw a one-time charge of $99.5 million related Yahoo’s closing of its Korean business assets.

Yahoo’s display advertising business was down 3.5 percent for the quarter compared to last year, while total search ad revenue rose 3.8 percent compared to last year.

In her first earnings call since joining Yahoo as CEO, Marissa Mayer didn’t waste any time explaining how her first 100 days have been.

“This job is tailor-made for me,” she said. “The core components of Yahoo’s business — search, mail, ads, mobile, news, and homepage — are also the same components that I’ve built my career upon.”

So, if you ever had any doubt about whether Yahoo was a media company or a tech company, the answer is now pretty crystal clear: Yahoo wants to champion its tech products as the best in the business. Mayer actually answered the question that the past two Yahoo CEOs have fumbled with, which puts her ahead based on that alone. If I were to read between the lines, this means Mayer is going to turn Yahoo into a serious Google competitor.

During the call, Mayer went on to highlight the company’s progress in changing the employee culture, which includes giving everyone personal goals that align with the company, new cell phones, and free food. The list of her own goals for the company began with making sure Yahoo executes faster and gets a return for investors. (And investors seem happy enough, with Yahoo’s stock is up three percent since the Q3 2012 earnings report hit.)

As for the individual pieces, Mayer started with Yahoo’s search business. Right now the company generates a lot of its search revenue through a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing, which it’s been satisfied with. Going forward, however, Yahoo wants to do more to grow search on its own. “There’s more opportunity to integrate search across other areas of our site,” Mayer said.

Some other highlights Mayer mentioned during the call:

• Yahoo’s mobile imprint will continue to grow, with half or more of its workforce focused on mobile in the future.
• Wants to invest more in advertising to focus more on technology rather than using just content.
• She feels Yahoo Answers is an undervalued property and wants to do more with it.
• As for content, there are some elements that are important for Yahoo to own, she said, highlighting original content from the London Olympics as well as user-generated content as found in Yahoo Answers.

Photo Credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Yahoo recently fired its chief executive officer, Carol Bartz, and though it was not reflected in this quarter’s earnings, the rocky road that Yahoo has faced is evident. The company is trying to bounce back, however, by beefing up its product offerings, including its recent Facebook app that allows Facebook users to access Yahoo content directly from withing the social network.

“We have a better product planning process in cycle,” said interim chief executive Tim Morse.

Here are some highlights from the call:

• Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs was $1,072 million, down 5 percent from the third quarter in 2010, which tapped out at $1,124 million.
• GAAP Revenue was $1,217 million, down 24 percent from $1,601 million in Q3 of 2010.
• Income from operations was $177 million, down six percent from $189 million in the same quarter last year.
• Net earnings were $293 million, down 26 percent from $396 million in Q3 2010.
• Net earnings per diluted share were .23 cents, down 21 percent from .29 cents in Q3 2010.

In Yahoo’s search agreement with Microsoft, the company will be reimbursed the same operating costs Yahoo incurs under the alliance. This quarter’s earnings reflect a $4 million reimbursement from Microsoft. The total costs on Yahoo’s end were more $150 million, exceeding the cap on reimbursements set by the deal.

[Photo courtesy of Kalim/Shutterstock]

Yahoo’s revenue was up 2 percent in the third quarter compared to the same quarter last year. The second largest search provider of the Internet brought in $1.6 billion last quarter, compared to $1.58 billion in the same quarter last year.

The web portal sold its job-hunting site, HotJobs, to competing job seeking site Monster.com for $225 million in February this year. Without that sale, Yahoo would have made less this quarter than it did last year — down 8.1 percent to about $172 million compared to last year’s third-quarter profits of $188 million. About a quarter of that — $42 million — came from reduced operating expenses and cutting product development funding.

Yahoo’s latest ho-hum performance again raises questions about whether Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz (pictured left) can make good on her promise to turn the company around since coming on board in 2009. Bartz has come under criticism for mishandling relationships with important partners in Asia and allowing high turnover in Yahoo’s executive ranks. Then there are the rumors that AOL and a number of private firms are planning to pick up the search provider and take it private.

It isn’t immediately clear where Yahoo goes from here, but one thing is obvious: investors didn’t appreciate Yahoo’s performance. The results ignited a minor sell-off and brought Yahoo’s shares down about 2.9 percent to $15.47 in extended trading today.