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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

#281

Post by wlesieutre »

ghaff wrote: post #242
wlesieutre wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, I doubt it's possible to have much of a community at the scale that Flickr is aiming for. You can do it with a niche little photography site, but anything operating at mass-market sizes will eventually turn into a lot of people spamming groups and internet jokes at each other because that sort of behavior feeds on itself and gets you more active users to generate money from. I hadn't checked it out recently, bu…

>I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy? It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself. However, the truth is that--while I…

Absolutely. There's a huge trend of websites redesigning and shuffling around just for the sake of doing it, and in the rare cases where you can still access older interfaces (I'm thinking of GMail here) it's totally arguable that the old ones are better. If you have a service that works well, staying the same is nothing to be ashamed of.

I haven't been putting any of my photography online for a couple of years now (aside from sharing to friends on Facebook), but the thought had cross my mind recently. It's a tossup between hosting them on my own site or going somewhere else where it can be "social" and more importantly, more broadly visible.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#282

Post by poofyleek »

Yahoo Core Business valuation is at this point low enough that any one of the Unicorns, e.g. Uber, Airbnb,... could easily afford it. Tumblr could have raised more money to become a bigger Unicorn and could have acquired Yahoo. Absurdity is reality.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#283

Post by jonknee »

profeta wrote: post #275
jonknee wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo's stake in Alibaba is by far the most valuable part of Yahoo. The "tax shenanigan" itself is worth more than Yahoo's core business! If she can't get excited about the majority of shareholder value she needs to step down ASAP.

because the CEO can do so much more than an accountant? do you also fire your doctors because they don't pray? the CEO should be rallying troops and making deals. well, at least that is the excuse for their obscene salaries and bonuses.

> the CEO should be rallying troops and making deals. well, at least that is the excuse for their obscene salaries and bonuses.

She looked like she was asleep. Wasn't rallying anyone or making any deals. Did you watch the interview? She was talking about the most important thing she has ever done as a CEO and couldn't care less. She has checked out.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#284

Post by kaizendad »

marssaxman wrote: post #267
drgath wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to list a few of the valuable properties off-hand: Homepage, Mail, Search, Tumblr, Flickr, Finance, News, Sports, Fantasy sports (including daily fantasy). Some of the bigger ones are billion+ dollar properties. Others are hundreds of millions. > It's not clear to me that it actually does anything worth paying for at this point. Few users of Google and Facebook actually "pay" for those services, they're primaril…

In what sense are they billion dollar properties? I didn't mean that users would pay for them; I meant that I don't see how one could use them to make money, or at least enough money that it would be worth bothering to acquire them.

Mail is the #1 e-mail provider.

News is massive.

Sports is massive and has one of the top Fantasy operations, a growing market.

Homepage is still the homepage for people who set homepages.

All are monetized through one of the most effective ad selling operations out there.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#285

Post by kaizendad »

charlesdm wrote: post #137
kaizendad wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cleverer than people are giving them credit for. It delivers immediate value to shareholders; it delivers opportunities for long term growth to shareholders; it creates one valuable Asian property that can acquire other properties and continue to deliver shareholder value; it creates a US company that is easier to acquire than it used to be, without the Alibaba share, and thus could be bought by a big media c…

Did she? Maybe I'm a bit more sceptical, but what did she actually achieve? 1. She failed at putting Yahoo back on the map. She spent billions on acquiring businesses that bring in close to no revenue. Maybe it's a great place to work, but if there's no money coming in, it won't stay great long. 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through. I would've been happy to cut her…

I think you're being too harsh on the revenue side: they make a ton of money. They may not be growing that at the desired rate, or in the right markets, or be appearing to be innovative (or being actually innovative), but Y! has a ton of cash flow.

When Mayer took over, they had no ability to attract or retain any kind of tech talent. Now, they can do so at the same rate as any other ad company. That's a big change.

She didn't hit it out of the park, but she's delivered her shareholders a solid double.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#286

Post by steve-howard »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #273
Govannon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan A, while fairly conventional, got shot down by the IRS. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-09/yahoo-s-ali...

So, the magic plan failed and now they are going with a real plan?

If I understand correctly, companies used to be able to spin off large amounts of shares tax free by bundling them with tiny segments of their business. The IRS used to let companies ask "did we do this right?" but this time instead of saying "yes" or "no" they said "we won't answer questions like this any more and we want to rethink our rules" which is still in progress.

So if the above is roughly accurate it's more like the loophole everybody used is closing and now they're going with a less desirable loophole.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#288

Post by ghaff »

wlesieutre wrote: post #281
ghaff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy? It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself. However, the truth is that--while I…

Absolutely. There's a huge trend of websites redesigning and shuffling around just for the sake of doing it, and in the rare cases where you can still access older interfaces (I'm thinking of GMail here) it's totally arguable that the old ones are better. If you have a service that works well, staying the same is nothing to be ashamed of. I haven't been putting any of my photography online for a couple of years now (…

For me, flickr works because I can drag photos that I've processed in Lightroom to the jfriedl publishing service, hit publish, and they go up to flickr where I can share them or people can just stumble across them. I have no doubt the discoverability is better than if I put them on my own site and I do indeed have people contacting me from time to time to use a photo for something or other. (And doubtless, many uses that I don't know about.)

It's not a big thing but the very modest price, the low friction, and contributing to the commons in however small a way work for me.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#289

Post by coldtea »

SteveNuts wrote: post #78
coldtea wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo! I feel silly saying it. I feel silly asking someone if they Yahoo!? Yeah, nothing like the gravitas and seriousness of Google.

"Google it" rolls off the tongue a lot better than "Yahoo it". Plus with Google's minimalist design (at least in the early years) they can get away with the silly name.

All those are after the fact explanations. When Yahoo! ruled the web -- and I was there for those years back in the mid-late nineties when it was as big as Google is now -- the name clearly wasn't a problem.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#290

Post by mschuster91 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #247
finnh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When/why do you expect Google to implode?

Google has been losing margin (hence profitability) in its search advertising business that powers everything it does fairly rapidly over the last 6 years. They have kept revenue/cash flow going/improving over that same period by putting more and more ads on their properties, dumping things which aren't making money, and trying really hard to push many of the moonshot projects into profitability. During the same 6 ye…

> Google has been losing margin (hence profitability) in its search advertising business that powers everything it does fairly rapidly over the last 6 years. They have kept revenue/cash flow going/improving over that same period by putting more and more ads on their properties, dumping things which aren't making money, and trying really hard to push many of the moonshot projects into profitability.

Google is trying to pull off a Saudi Arabia: make as much profit as they can and pour said profits into R&D (tourism) so that when the time comes and people are not interested as much as now in AdWords (oil), the "moonshot" investments will have unlocked new sectors where profit can be made.

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