Is Yahoo’s Turnaround Under-reported?

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By Jacob Maslow

Yahoo Website On Google Nexus 5
Yahoo Website On Google Nexus 5

It’s very easy to feel sorry for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer. It really is. A lot of digital ink has been spilled on the value of the Alibaba stock and Yahoo Japan. While these holdings do amount to a huge pile of cash to the tune of $47B, there’s a larger story here that is often under-reported. The large story is that Marissa Mayer is actually making solid progress in turning Yahoo around. Yahoo has often been looked at as a relic or dinosaur. A lot of Yahoo critics would like to cast Yahoo as a throwback to Web 1.0 and the Internet circa the year 2000. They roll their eyes at the whole concept of a portal and buying companies with strictly traffic in mind.

Well, a lot of those haters and critics have another thing coming to them when we analyze Yahoo’s overall health. In terms of mobile advertising growth, Yahoo is actually going to outpace Twitter as a mobile advertising company. That is phenomenal considering the fact that online advertising is swiftly moving towards mobile platforms. Far from a relic of the past, this shows that Yahoo is making a good progress in its efforts to stay relevant in the mobile age.

 

Another unexpected development in Yahoo’s fortunes is that its share of the global search engine market has increased by 1.6%. This is a big turn of events. Normally, it’s very hard to carve out market share in the search engine world. In fact, a lot of analysts are already dismissing Google’s competitors because they think that Big G has that market all sewn up. Well think again. Indeed, according to some estimates, Yahoo’s total percentage of global search is 12%. This is a large revenue base considering the billions of searches performed each day. All told, there are glimmers of hope that not only would Yahoo remain relevant in this day and age but might actually reinvent itself as a truly innovative technology company.

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