Yahoo - Considering selling off core business

It’s official.

That’s amazing.

And with this move, Yahoo! proper becomes. . . a holding company for 15% of Alibaba’s stock. I guess Mayer can basically call in each morning, ask “Does Alibaba still exist as a profitable entity?” and then call it a day if the answer is “Yes” from now on. May not need much more staff than another guy at the other end of the line with a window open to Google Finance, though.

Well Mayer will still be (for now), CEO of whatever the spin-off vehicle is called.

Supposedly they’ll owe Mayer over 100m if they had kicked her out and sell. It sounds like they’re trying to also minimize the damage her removal can cause.

She may have had good ideas about Tumblr and Flickr but she ruined the front page of Yahoo. Before it was just another generic portal like MSN - harmless but also an easy default page to bear. They turned into a front page with little to no original content and mostly links to other sites. I mean as a front page = the company it was dead either way, but she made it worse.

This is really the rub of it all. Yahoo was sliding out no matter what. I guess it comes down to whether or not you think Mayer did a good job slowing the slide and minimizing the losses.

CEO Marissa Mayer:

"Today, we’re announcing a strategic plan that we strongly believe will enable us to accelerate Yahoo’s transformation. This is a strong plan calling for bold shifts in products and in resources.”

15% workforce cut.

Only 85% left to go before they start making sense as a company. What a sad little puddle they are these days, slowly drying up.

Oh, hey. About that Tumblr purchase for $1 billion…

Yahoo said it may have to write down the goodwill value of Tumblr, more than two years after the web pioneer spent $1.1 billion to buy the microblogging site.

Yahoo said earlier in the month it took a $230 million impairment charge related to Tumblr and was considering strategic alternatives for its core internet business.

“It is reasonably possible that changes in judgments … could cause the company to consider some portion or all of the remaining goodwill of the Tumblr reporting unit to become impaired,” Yahoo said in a regulatory filing on Monday.

You mean they aren’t turning a massive profit on millions of incest-themed Supernatural gifs? Shocking.

Hey, hey, the less said about Wincest the better. shudder

As a genuine fan of Doctor Who, Supernatural, and Hannibal, I find tumblr to be a. . . distressing place to visit.

Tumblr is actually relevant– Marissa was right about that. She just couldn’t find a way to monetize it.

You’re telling me. I love Doctor Who and Supernatural, and while there are wonderful parts of both fandoms (like the help line Misha and Jensen [of Supernatural] are starting that is in-part being run by fans), there are dark corners of fandom that just…ugh…

I don’t know if it’s like that with all fandoms (Firefly fandom doesn’t appear to have as much in the way of ickiness), but with those…yeesh…

You haven’t looked hard enough.

Thank god.

Maybe I don’t get tumblr, or I’m using it wrong, but it isn’t a site you visit. I mean, I used tumblr to create a quick personal temporary website for one of my kids to do a project. It’s not as if you go to tumblr and see all sorts of icky fan fic/imagery. Seems you only hit the distressing microsites if you were to actively seek them out.

In fairness, I’m exaggerating just a little (whodda thunk!).

Tumblr can be as much or as little of a community as you’d like. Like twitter or Instagram, depending on who you follow (and what sorts of content those people repost), you do exert a fair degree of control over what you see.

But it’s also infamous as the primary breeding grounds of the sort of obsessive, creepily sexualized, high-passion-but-higher-anger fandoms that tend to earn entire communities bad raps. I’m perfectly able to carry on enjoying Doctor Who in spite of the people writing ten-thousand-word diatribes on exactly why they would or would not fuck Pete Capaldi’s Doctor, but there’s a lot of folks who find the whole concept irretrievably tainted by the association.

Verizon may be angling to buy what remains of Yahoo.

What a bad idea that would be. Not that Verizon has had many good ideas since FIOS. I think it would be a bad idea for Google too, but at least there are some Yahoo assets left that could be integrated in a more or less sensible way if Google bought them. I suspect the Google bid is based more on sentiment since Yahoo were the ones to beat back in 1999 and since the last 18 years have been Google crushing Yahoo at every turn.