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Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

nytimes.com

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Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#221

Post by shas3 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #208

So I don't understand one simple thing: The stock is up 120% since Mayer took over. Even adjusting for compounding interest over 3.43 years, this is like 25+% yearly growth. So the core business is crapping out? So what? Why is everyone dumping on Mayer? I don't even think I could fix the core Yahoo business. They have to pay a 50% premium for developers just because it's Yahoo and their core audience is the technica…

Corporate governance is a lot about perceptions. Even if you set aside the fact that most of that growth comes from Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, you still have the question about Yahoo's future and vision. If there is a perception that their future is shaky, that matters more than if things are likely to turn out badly. Should add, IANAL aka, I am no analyst

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#222

Post by ghaff »

pitt1980 wrote: post #108

what multiple of its earnings was Yahoo trading at at the height of its glory? given that we now know the postscript (or at least much of it) did that multiple make any sense?

Undefined. Yahoo was one of the first big Internet companies in the late 1990s to make you shake your head and go "This must be a bubble." They had some ridiculous valuation at a time when they were losing money so P/E doesn't mean anything.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#223

Post by 1024core »

voltagex_ wrote: post #24

Again I ask, where should I take ~30GB of photos that I have on Flickr? Yes, I have other backups but I need offsite storage. Guess I'll have to budget for it now. Backblaze B2 isn't quite ready yet.

Get Amazon Prime ($99/year?), and get unlimited photo storage: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos

And free 2-day shipping (if you're in the US).

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#224

Post by ghaff »

ArtDev wrote: post #128

Yahoo bought my favorite task manager, and killed it. Yahoo bought Flickr, and has been slowly killing it for years. Yahoo bought delicious.com, said they were going to kill it, but later sold it. Most of the users that left never came back. Has Yahoo done anything worthwhile in the last 15 years besides disrupt innovation in a bad way?

In the case of delicious, in all fairness, the whole tagging/folksonomies thing ended up being pretty much a passing fad. (Though I do use pinboard myself and find it useful.)

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#225

Post by declan »

voltagex_ wrote: post #24

Again I ask, where should I take ~30GB of photos that I have on Flickr? Yes, I have other backups but I need offsite storage. Guess I'll have to budget for it now. Backblaze B2 isn't quite ready yet.

Take a look at Google Photos. It's very good and getting better.

I'd like it to have more advanced options, but it's probably the best choice and well integrated with Google Drive and Google+ (if you use it).

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#226

Post by joeblau »

3pt14159 wrote: post #208

So I don't understand one simple thing: The stock is up 120% since Mayer took over. Even adjusting for compounding interest over 3.43 years, this is like 25+% yearly growth. So the core business is crapping out? So what? Why is everyone dumping on Mayer? I don't even think I could fix the core Yahoo business. They have to pay a 50% premium for developers just because it's Yahoo and their core audience is the technica…

The stock is up because overall, Yahoo as an overall business is doing great. The problem is that the best financial parts of Yahoo are its investments. If Yahoo was solely an investment company, it would have a great record. Yahoo, however, has the core business which is what most people interact with on a daily basis that loses money. I joked with my friend at the beginning of 2015 that Yahoo performs betters as a VC than as an internet company.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#227

Post by hueving »

3pt14159 wrote: post #208

So I don't understand one simple thing: The stock is up 120% since Mayer took over. Even adjusting for compounding interest over 3.43 years, this is like 25+% yearly growth. So the core business is crapping out? So what? Why is everyone dumping on Mayer? I don't even think I could fix the core Yahoo business. They have to pay a 50% premium for developers just because it's Yahoo and their core audience is the technica…

They could have literally fired everyone and left it as a shell holding company of the Alibaba stock and it would be worth more than it is now (the current value of Yahoo is less than it's stock holdings of Alibaba).

She didn't appear to add any value to Yahoo at all. I agree that I'm not sure anyone could have, but that doesn't change the fact that she didn't accomplish the job she was hired to do.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#228

Post by ghaff »

pmlnr wrote: post #73
ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say. There isn't a lot of direct competition. Smugmug probably comes closest (and I see their current pricing structure again makes it reasonable for non-professionals which it wasn't for a time). It really depends on how many people pay for a premium ("pro") flickr account which Yahoo seems to have been fairly ambivalent about collecting over the past few years. Personally, I'd find it something of a bummer…

I've been running my own site for displaying images; for backup, I have a dedicated server + synthing. It's the archives I'd really, really miss, from people who more or less stopped taking photos. If Flickr was to offer what Smugmug and 500px does for pros ( like direct upload from Lightroom, eyecandy portfolios, etc. ) instead of focusing on an app that uploads every picture it finds by default, I believe they'd se…

>It's the archives I'd really, really miss, from people who more or less stopped taking photos.

That's fair. The greatest loss if flickr were to go away at some point would be that a lot of content would be permanently removed from the Web. And flickr's scale is such that I can't really imagine something like the archive team being able to copy flickr content and archive it in a useful searchable way. I may be wrong though.

Given that there are functioning businesses in the flickr vein, I'm reasonably hopeful it will continue on though. Even if that's wishful thinking on my part.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#229

Post by samstave »

MrApathy wrote: post #91
fluxquanta wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet. Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.

As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo. I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of…

I'm 41 -- I have always detested yahoo's clutterly, ugly start page.

I gave up Yahoo mail years ago.

The only thing I ever went to glance at was finance.yahoo.com -- because it seemed to be the literally only page that you could gleen info from yahoo in a split second...

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#230

Post by untog »

Quinner wrote: post #181
vonklaus wrote: post #31

Paul Graham's What happened to Yahoo [0] is probably just as relevent now as when he wrote it in 2010. > One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company. That was a bad decision then, but at the time content and media were newer on the internet and had value. They don't anymore. Yahoo finance and fantasy sports are nice things to provid…

Except the NYT has surprisingly turned things around, considering five years ago they were a dinosaur on it's way out, much as Yahoo was and is. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/business/media/new-york-ti...

True, though I think the most accurate statement is that NYT is performing admirably in a horrible, horrible industry.
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