Yahoo Decline Slows As Latest Financials Released But Oblivion Still Looms

Yahoo, a once Titan of the World Wide Web had only surprise in its latest quarterly release last week, and that was that the results weren’t quite as bad as everyone had expected.

Not that that says much about the shape of the company. The only thing apparently holding up the already low share price for investors in the company is the imminent sale of the web side of the business.

A closer look at the smoke and mirrors approach to the figures that CEO Marissa Mayer released last week, showed  that despite the slowing exodus of ad dollars, a large part of the halt in the decline of Yahoo centred around the fact the business had sold off over two hundred million dollars’ worth of real estate, which put some considerable black back in the ledger. But as one journalist noted, you can’t sell the same property twice…

Overall the figures showed a company that was experiencing a long slow death, with money in real terms, down by 15% on the previous quarter, another loss yet again.

Any hope for Yahoo now centres on the sale of its core web businesses, but even with that not anything is certain.  Tumbler, the social media blog site that Yahoo acquired for one point one billion dollars back in 2013 has also seen a steady but tragic fall in value.

Advertising revenue shared from the Yahoo’s choice of Bing as its default search provider did see a 50% rise in revenue, but as one analyst pointed out, all that had really happened was that Yahoo had gotten themselves a bigger slice of an ever smaller pie.

Bidders for the core aspects of Yahoo have come down to five alleged final bidders, including Verizon and AT&T.

The deadline for bids comes next Monday, and Mayer will want that sale to happen sooner rather than later, because the way things seem to be going, it’s uncertain how much interest there will be if the company keeps on losing money.