Tag: yahoo

You’re trapped by mobile ads

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

330ogleA frenzy of competition from major vendors for advertising revenue including the mobile market means growth between now and 2020 compared to the conventional advertising market.

That’s the conclusion of ABI Research today, which said in a report the competition is between Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others to push adverts at you through your mobile device.

Growth in the mobile advertising market is set to grow 16 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020, compared to the total advertising market at 11 percent.

ABI thinks that mobile advertising will represent over 50 percent of total advertising revenue in the next few years.

Right now, Twitter and Facebook have the largest chunk of the market and so the strongest mobile advertising revenues.

The research company believes that there will be plenty of acquisitions as the different players jockey for position to grow their revenues.

Google is the clear leader in the search advertising sector but it faces increasing competition in the years to come, too.

US president goes to Silicon Valley

Posted on February 13, 2015 by - News

Obama BarackPresident Barack Obama is to meet CEOs in Silicon Valley today to canvass their views on ways to improve existing cyber legislation.

That’s in the wake of massive attacks on healthcare company Anthem and Sony.

According to Reuters, Obama is expected to say that government and the private sector need to cooperate better to meet the challenges of cyber attacks.

A White House representative said that the idea is that if the USA gets it right, more people and companies worldwide will do business with America.

But while Obama will meet some CEOs, some will pointedly stay away including Google, Facebook and Yahoo. They don’t think that the US has done enough to protect their customers from NSA surveillane.

Obama wants Congress to pass a law giving liability protection to companies that share their data about security.

India bans sex determination tests

Posted on January 28, 2015 by - News

India_flagThe Supreme Court of India today ordered Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo not to carry adverts for products that will predict the gender of a child.
The court made the ruling because female infanticide and abortion of female children is relatively common in India.
The Supreme Court said that such factors were causing an imbalance of genders in India..
A few days ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the country’s sex ratio was deteriorating.
The practice of determining a future child’s sex is illegal in India. Modi is currently promoting a campaign in India stressing gender equality. The decision is an interim decision, according to India Today, and will be reviewed again in early February.

Yahoo plans to spin off AliBaba stake

Posted on January 28, 2015 by - News

Ali_Baba_and_the_Forty_ThievesYahoo plans to spin off its 15 percent stake in China’s Alibaba as shareholders demand that it hand over to shareholders the cash it has made from its  prized e-commerce investment.

The Alibaba shares are worth valued at roughly $40 billion.

Shares of Yahoo rose about seven percent to $51.45 in after hours trading on Tuesday, following the tax-free spinoff announcement and earnings which just beat analysts forecasts even as its revenues slightly lagged estimates.

Selling the Alibaba stake could pressure on Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to make quicker progress in strengthening Yahoo’s struggling media and advertising business.

Shareholders feel that Yahoo and its stake in Alibaba would be worth more separately, as long as the Alibaba shares are not subject to the standard 35 percent tax rate that would be incurred from selling the shares.

Yahoo is worth about $45 billion which includes its Alibaba stake of nearly $40 billion, meaning the current Yahoo share price assigns little value to the core business. Some investors believe the email, website and other operations are worth between $7 billion and $8 billion.

Mayer promised investors that the company’s display advertising revenue, which declined 4 percent in 2014, would return to growth this year. But the company’s forecast for revenue in the first quarter implied continuing problems.

Yahoo said that revenue, excluding fees paid to partner websites in the first quarter, would range from $1.02 billion to $1.06 billion, compared to the $1.09 billion last year.

Yahoo said its board of directors has authorized a plan to spin off the stake, tax-free, into a newly formed independent registered investment company. The stock of the company will be distributed pro-rata to Yahoo shareholders and the transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015, Yahoo said.

The new entity will include Yahoo’s 384 million shares in Alibaba as well as an unspecified “legacy, ancillary” Yahoo business, the company said.

Yahoo’s revenue, excluding fees paid to partner websites, declined 1.8 percent year-on-year in the final three months of 2014 to $1.18 billion, just shy of Wall Street expectations.

 

Google’s search share falls

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

330ogleA report said that Google lost US search share in December while Yahoo gained share for the first time in a long time.
The report, from Statcounter, said that in December Google managed to grab 75.2 percent of US searches, with Microsoft’s Bing coming in second at 12.5 percent and Yahoo third with 10.4 percent.
Google had been the default search engine for people using the popular Firefox browser until last month, when Firefox instead struck a deal with Yahoo.
Firefox is not the most popular browser and held  12 percent of internet usage in December 2014.
Statcounter compiles its figures by surveying 15 billion page views a month to ver three million sites.  It does not record figures for Western Europe.

 

Yahoo investors want Mayer’s head on a spike

Posted on November 12, 2014 by - News

11Knives are being sharpened, torches and pitchforks are being prepared, as Yahoo shareholders prepare to lynch CEO Marissa Mayer.

So far the top 10 Yahoo shareholders have made a direct appeal to  AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to explore a merger and run the combined company.

Their move follows an activist campaign by hedge fund Starboard Value, which is pushing Yahoo to consider a deal with AOL and unlock Yahoo’s valuable stakes in Asian Web companies.

Armstrong has been receptive to these Yahoo shareholders and acknowledged the potential benefits of a deal, the Yahoo investors said.

But Armstrong has indicated he would only consider a friendly deal, which would probably not involve Mayer’s head on display.

Shareholders think that if the two companies merged the combined company could yield as much as $1.5 billion in cost savings.

Starboard wants Yahoo to spin off its Web and email business, merging them into AOL, one Yahoo investor who has spoken with the activist said. That would leave Yahoo’s holdings in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in a separate company, satisfying investors who want the company to monetize those assets.

Starboard has a history of taking on AOL, unsuccessfully. In  2012  it lost a battle to unseat three board directors.

Armstrong is a former Google exec who has been at the helm at AOL since 2009, is credited with reviving a dying brand. AOLs market cap of $3.5 billion has roughly doubled in value since he has been in charge.

Yahoo stock has tripled since Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO in July 2012, but most of this is due to the rapid appreciation in the value of its Asian assets. Mayer has urged investors to be patient for what she has said will be a multi-year effort to revitalise the company.

Yahoo kills off Yahoo

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News

blazing-saddles-655Yahoo has decided to kill off the product which started it all off.

In 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. In March of that year, they gave it the name “Yahoo!” for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

At the time, human-curated web listings were the bee’s knees and search engines were not exactly up to snuff. At the time, the web was a smaller place and in those golden times  children were respectful to their parents.

Directories were killed off as the web grew and Google, in particular, made search engines useful. The directory fell out of fashion. Yahoo kept its directory around with hundreds of thousands of sites listed, but fewer people use it.

Now it is for the chop. Yahoo has shut down more than 60 products and services in a bid to do fewer things better. The directory has escaped previous culls, but has finally been deemed surplus to requirements.

You will have until December 31 before the directory is switched off and joins the heavenly chorus of out-of-date tech.

Yahoo accused of Mexican stand-off

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

zapataTwo Mexican companies have sued Yahoo and law firm Baker & McKenzie in New York federal court, accusing them of engineering a conspiracy to avoid a $2.7 billion judgment.

Worldwide Directories S.A. de C.V. and Ideas Interactivas S.A. de C.V claim that Yahoo and Baker & McKenzie enlisted the help of a senior Mexican judge and other court personnel to “corrupt the appeals process and overturn the judgment.”

It all started with a contractual dispute over deals between Yahoo and the companies over an online search project in Mexico. All sides fell out and the companies filed a lawsuit in 2011 in Mexico, claiming Yahoo had breached its duties by terminating the agreements prematurely.

In December 2012, a Mexican judge issued a $2.7 billion preliminary judgment against Yahoo.

According to Thursday’s lawsuit, Yahoo and its lawyers at Baker & McKenzie successfully reduced the award to $172,500 by instructing a corrupt Mexican federal judge to meet in secret with the appellate chief judge and “intimidate” her into slashing the damages.

The appeals court also granted Yahoo a $3 million judgment on its counterclaims against the companies because of the coercion, the lawsuit said.

The company has evidence of the conspiracy in the form of sworn statements from witnesses who directly observed the misconduct, including the original trial judge who issued the judgment.

David Stone, a lawyer for the companies based in New Jersey, said the lawsuit was intended to prevent two major US corporations from “interfering with the Mexican judicial process.”