Investopedia: Yahoo! Reclaims Traffic Leadership, But Can It Turn It Into Cash?

A curious thing happened in internet-land in July. According to comScore, Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) surpassed Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to take the top spot in web traffic for July 2013, the first time in more than two years. Yahoo! edged out Google with 197 million unique visitors against Google's 192 million. As always, though, the devil is in the details. It remains to be seen whether Yahoo! can leverage its position into revenue and profits.

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Investopedia: Yahoo! Still Needs To Generate Better Intrinsic Value

A year into her tenure as Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq:YHOO) CEO, Marissa Mayer may have ruffled a few feathers, but Yahoo!'s feathers were badly in need of ruffling as it was well on the AOL (NYSE:AOL)/MySpace path to irrelevance and doom. While there's still quite a lot of work to be done in turning the business around, the better-than-70% rise in the shares over the past year has to be encouraging to shareholders. The biggest question now is whether or not Yahoo! can take the cash coming from the Alibaba IPO and reinvest it into sustainable cash-generating growth opportunities.

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FinancialEdge: Is Yahoo's Real Opportunity What You Think It Is?

Flogging the rumors of a Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) buyout is a well-rehearsed move among financial journalists, over the last year or so. Certainly this one-time internet darling still captures a lot of attention, as did the stories about Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) or Alibaba possibly acquiring it. In all of the discussions of what might happen to Yahoo!, though, it seems like there is relatively little acknowledgment that the company have still have its own independent future. (For other acquisitions, see Biggest Merger and Acquisition Disasters.)

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Investopedia: It's Not Geting Any Easier For Google

Companies spend a lot of their corporate adolescence convincing investors that they can carve out a business and take on the big dogs. If they succeed, their reward is a new round of questions about whether or not the company can maintain that momentum and find new markets and opportunities that offer similar margins and returns. 


That, then, would seem to be the challenge for Google (Nasdaq:GOOG). No sane investor questions what the company has accomplished in taking on the likes of Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO), AOL (NYSE:AOL), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL), but now the stock sentiment seems pregnant with doubts as to whether the company can find new business on par with the old.

A Mostly Encouraging Third Quarter
Google's third quarter results offer both good and bad news on that score. On the positive side, net revenue rose 37% (gross revenue rose 33%), and revenue from Google-owned sites was up 39 and 15%, sequentially. Mobile also continues to be strong grower, though still a relatively small contributor.


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Investopedia: Yahoo! - Everybody's Favorite Target?

As a general rule, investors should never pay much attention to buyout rumors that spring up in the weeks immediately preceding another earnings cycle. Buy-side analysts and managers are desperate for any shred of tradeable information, sell-side analysts are desperate to drive trading, and financial writers are desperate to meet quotas and deadlines.


When times are tough, desperate people go back to what's comfortable. In tech, that means rumors and speculation around the fate of Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO). This time around, though, the change in leadership at the company at least makes the speculation seems a little more fresh.

The Obligatory Microsoft Mention
Although Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) never seems to move when or where the experts say it will, analysts and writers continue to flog the "Microsoft should buy Yahoo!" meme. Okay, it makes some sense. Microsoft and Yahoo! are interlinked in the internet search business and it is not hard to imagine that properties like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports could be leverageable on the MSN platform.


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Investopedia: Google Thinks Global, Buys Local

It's fair to wonder if there are many companies more schizophrenic than Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) right now. Still a dominant name in Internet search and online advertising, the company is trying to push its Android operating system for phones and tablets, expanding further into cloud computing, and buying hardware company Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI). And now the company is adding another business to its roster with the acquisition of privately-held Zagat Survey.

The Deal
Because the deal for Zagat is so small, Google does not have a legal compulsion to release many details about the transaction. Given that it appears that no federal antitrust review is called for, that suggests a deal value below $66 million (the current threshold for Clayton Act reviews). Going a step further, if online information and service companies like Bankrate (Nasdaq:RATE), Morningstar (Nasdaq:MORN) and Expedia (Nasdaq:EXPE) are decent benchmarks for valuation, that suggests Zagat could have a revenue base somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million to $30 million - not really an earth-shaking deal for a company with over $33 billion in trailing revenue.

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Investopedia: Yahoo! Finds It Can't Un-Hit The Iceberg

When Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq:YHOO) board of directors hired Carol Bartz as CEO in January 2009, did they charge her with the job of justifying their decision to reject the $45 billion bid from Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) a year earlier (the one that arguably also led to Jerry Yang stepping down)? Or was the decision simply based on the need for a new voice to lead a turnaround? Whatever the implicit, explicit-but-behind-closed-doors, or explicit reasons for bringing Bartz on board, Yahoo!'s board has tired of the experiment and fired Bartz late Tuesday.


Who's Next? 
According to a message from Bartz, the chairman of the board (Roy Bostock) fired her by phone - something that may not necessarily rankle the wired generation, but a move that will likely lead to a few mutters and shakes of the head in the older generation(s). In place of Bartz, the board has named CFO Tim Morse as interim CEO and will start the executive search process.

What Now? 
Oh by the way, the board is now apparently open to the idea of selling the company now - years after the point where Yahoo! ceased to be an interesting player. That, in a nutshell, is also likely a big part of the reason that the board felt Bartz had to go.






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