Yahoo: Revenue down 23 percent
Internet pioneer Yahoo continues to struggle with a shrinking business. In the second quarter, revenue fell 23 percent to $1.2 billion. At the same time, however, Yahoo was able to cut costs, thereby increasing its profit by 11 percent to $237 million.
Among other things, company CEO Carol Bartz spoke on Tuesday of a weakness in so-called display advertising - that is, graphic ads on websites. Actually, these are Yahoo's hobbyhorse, but the big rival Google penetrates further and further into the field. Just recently, Google took over the specialist Admeld. With the social network Facebook, a third powerful rival has also appeared on the ad market.
In order to improve the market positioning of her company, Bartz has cut hundreds of jobs and entered into a cooperation with Microsoft for Internet search. So Yahoo now uses Microsoft's Bing search engine, but in return must give up some of its ad revenue to the software company. "We're making clear progress on Internet search," Bartz said. But the effort wasn't enough for investors. Analysts had expected a better result and also criticized what they considered too weak an outlook.
Especially when compared with Google's figures, it becomes clear how difficult Yahoo is currently having it: The search engine market leader boosted its revenue last quarter by 32 percent to just over $9.0 billion and posted a profit of $2.5 billion - 36 percent more than in the same period last year. (SDA)
