As much of the talk around the potential sale of Yahoo of late has centred on the fate and possible fault of its high-profile CEO as the aging tech giant's descent towards Internet obscurity.
Now Verizon has confirmed it will pay $4.8m for the Sunnyvale, California tech company's core operating businesses, it might surprise some to find it's not quite time to write a business obituary for 'Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO'.
In a lengthy statement today, the former Google wunderkind declared her love for the company, her hopes for its future, and her intentions to remain at its helm.
Whether or not it is a long-term move or simply a case of staying in position and saving face until the acquisition is completed in early 2017 is not yet clear, but Mayer certainly put a positive spin on her four years with the company to date.
She wrote:
The teams here have not only built incredible products and technologies, but have built Yahoo into one of the most iconic, and universally well-liked companies in the world. One that continues to impact the lives of more than a billion people.
I’m incredibly proud of everything that we’ve achieved, and I’m incredibly proud of our team. For me personally, I’m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter.
As we work to close this agreement in Q1 2017, it’s more important than ever that we come together as one global team to continue executing on our strategic plan through the remainder of the year. We have delivered the first half of the year with pride, achieving our goals. Now, it is up to us to make Yahoo’s final quarters as an independent company count.
Yahoo is a company that changed the world. Now, we will continue to, with even greater scale, in combination with Verizon and AOL.
Thanks,
Marissa
It is perhaps fitting that Mayer should highlight the work done on products and technologies, as it is certainly an area in which many agree she has excelled. Using her 13 years of experience in the field at Google, she can be credited with significantly improving a number of Yahoo's product designs and boosting core apps traffic.
Nevertheless, revenue didn't respond positively, and Mayer has been the one increasingly coming under fire as investors worried whether its sale of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba would be tax-free, major company figures departed, acquisitions failed and the now-announced sale looked imminent.
Having taken the reins back in July 2012 with the task of restoring Yahoo to its former glory, she has now overseen the end of its independence.
If there was a recurring criticism of Mayer, it was that she did not have the financial acumen to fully revive a Grand Old Lady of the Internet Age which, despite its struggles, still had "a cooperative board, a truckload of cash, and one billion monthly visitors."
The Variety article from which that line is taken also listed the many, many failed start-up acquisitions that Yahoo made on Mayer's watch, costing roughly $3bn in total.
"Befuddlement is the best way I could characterise Marissa Mayer’s hire,” Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, told Variety's Todd Spangler. “Sure, you had someone who understood consumer use of digital media — but no core experience with Yahoo’s business, which was generating ad revenue from Madison Avenue.”
And it all started so well. Maybe hopes were a little too high...
Yahoo
Ushering in her own people as part of a management overhaul upon her arrival, Mayer was praised for improving the "internal culture" at Yahoo.
She also turned around the company's fortunes in the short term. Its stock jumped from $15.74 per share to around $28 after her first year in charge.
The fact going through Yahoo was one of the only ways of investing in Alibaba offered early protection, however.
Once that company went public in 2014, things started to deteriorate. The Yahoo sale has been done in part to free up that Alibaba stock without paying tax. Ironically, it's the unequivocal success of a 2005 investment of $1bn in the Chinese start-up that has brought the curtain down on Yahoo as an independent entity.
As previously stated, the acquisitions under Mayer have not been so successful. Two stand out as particular flops amongst the 53 acquisitions that suggest a scattershot approach that didn't pay off: the $1bn purchase of Tumblr, and the $584m shelled out for video-ad platform BrightRoll.
Even today, Mayer is talking up Yahoo's “Mavens” businesses – that is, mobile, video, native, and social ads.
"We invested in and built Mavens from basically zero in 2011 into $1.6B of GAAP Revenue in 2015," she wrote.
"We streamlined and modernized every aspect of our consumer products, and, with Gemini and BrightRoll, we dramatically improved our advertiser products. This only scratches the surface of what we’ve achieved … and we all know how much hard work it took to get here."
The numbers show that Mavens hasn't worked, however, with projected revenue, excluding traffic-acquisition costs, to decline by as much as 17% in 2016. Search and display ad revenue is also set to drop by double digit percentages.
As for Tumblr, it will add a mere $25 million in operating income to Yahoo's coffers this year.
Mayer is right when she says "Yahoo is a company that changed the world". But it was already failing to adapt to a changing world when she arrived four years ago.
Despite her best efforts, and protests to the contrary today, she ultimately wasn't able to prevent an Internet era coming to an end.
