"Troika"

Abstract: Foreign media today wrote that home, email, search is considered to be Yahoo's troika, in the eyes of advertisers, they are Yahoo value system's main driving force. However, these three major asset flows have recently fallen sharply, and this

Foreign media today wrote that the home page, email, search is considered to be Yahoo's "troika", in the eyes of advertisers, they are Yahoo value system, the main driving force. However, these three major asset flows have recently seen a sharp decline, and the trend seems to be unstoppable, which not only affected the value of Yahoo's core assets, but also overshadowed the prospects of Mayer's revival strategy.

The following are the main contents of the article:

"Troika"

In this week's International Consumer Electronics Show ("CES"), Yahoo's new management, including CEO Marissa Marissa Mayer, has frequently contacted large advertisers in an attempt to convince them that advertising on Yahoo can be rewarded with high returns.

One selling point of Yahoo's self-promotion to advertisers is the size of its audiences, especially the core departments of its homepage, email, search and other Yahoo sites. However, according to the Market Research institute comscore Statistics, last year, Yahoo, the three major sectors of the business continued to decline, a period of time also saw a sharp decline. Last November and December, for example, Yahoo's search volume in the United States fell 28% and 24%, respectively, and email traffic fell 16% and 12% year-on-year.

This trend will seriously weaken Yahoo's bargaining power, as the home page, email and search have long been seen as Yahoo's "troika", and advertisers always see them as the most important factor in evaluating Yahoo's value system. In addition, the music, film and television, games, tourism and other Yahoo site section of the traffic in the same period also fell sharply.

Curbing this downward trend is crucial to Yahoo's revival plan, as Ms. Mayer herself has always stressed the need for scale in the process of Yahoo's new business. In her view, only the user size of 100 million, revenue potential is expected to exceed 100 million U.S. dollars business, the future will have prospects.

While this is an ambitious goal, the fact that significant asset flows have slipped is believed to be one of the biggest headaches for Yahoo's management, especially since they remain an important source of revenue for Yahoo, or Ms. Mayer's important piece to revive Yahoo by releasing important products.

Flow Drop

This is not because the size of Yahoo is not big enough, especially compared to most sites, Yahoo does not exist this problem. According to Nielsen's latest report, Yahoo, one of the most important Internet brands, averaged 141.6 million independent user visits in 2012, the third-largest internet company in the United States, after Google and Facebook. In ComScore's report, Yahoo ranked even more, after Google, November months of independent user access to 171.4 million.

But over the years, the flow of important sections of these Yahoo sites has been marked by an unstoppable decline. In the past, Yahoo will publish the data on its interactive pages so investors can understand the important issues they face. But Yahoo abruptly ended the practice in the last quarter, and the interactive page disappeared completely from its website. Yahoo's PR department never gave a statement.

In fact, the reason Yahoo is making this change is not hard to understand--the data is simply not shot, will only magnify Yahoo face a major challenge: how to create the so-called "wonderful" experience that Ms. Mayer repeatedly emphasized, to attract users to interact with Yahoo products. But it turns out that Yahoo seems to be facing insurmountable hurdles in this area.

According to comscore in the small scope of public data, November 2012, Yahoo home page monthly independent user visits fell 17%, from 110.9 million to 91.8 million, Yahoo email fell 16%, from 92 million to 77.7 million, Yahoo search year-on-year big drop 28%, Dropped from 93.3 million to 66.9 million. Yahoo site three major plate of other data, such as the Total Page view, visit total time, and so on, but also a large landslide, usually reached about One-third.

Few bright spots

Flickr, a relatively small photo-sharing site, is one of the few bright spots in Yahoo, where independent user visits rose 37% from 19.4 million to 26.7 million in November 2012. But Flickr will not make a profit for Yahoo, even if it reflects Yahoo's advanced technology and innovation.

At the same time, comscore data showed that from December 2011 to December 2012, Yahoo home page performance more stable, monthly independent user visits increased by 4%, from 109.4 million to 114.1 million, but other important data has been increased. For example, the total number of visits increased by 14%, but the average access time decreased by 13.6%;

Yahoo email and search conditions have not improved: The former December 2012 months of independent user visits fell 12% year-on-year, from 89.9 million to 78.7 million, the latter fell by 24%, from 88.7 million to 67.4 million. Other data on the two major plates have also declined sharply.

After Ms. Mayer's helm, Yahoo has revised its email and homepage, hoping to curb the decline in traffic. Yahoo home page After the revision of more emphasis on mobile and social functions, trying to build Yahoo as a content discovery platform.

While the reasons for Yahoo's slide are numerous, the problem is that most competitors do not have a sharp decline, even if the flow of traffic does not increase. Sometimes, some websites complain that there is a problem with the computational metrics of market research institutions such as comscore, but Yahoo has previously used comscore data in public documents. In addition, Yahoo insiders also pointed out that comscore data is in the right direction, should be similar to Yahoo's own tracking data.

That is to say, Yahoo website traffic decline already is indisputable fact. This is clearly the reason why Ms. Mayer has repeatedly stressed the importance of moving since she became Yahoo's CEO. The comscore report does not include data on Yahoo's mobile business, but several people familiar with the matter said Yahoo's mobile-side traffic has grown strongly thanks to mobile apps and support for mobile Web services, which have now reached around 70 million per cent of independent user visits.

Products for the most

But unlike the home page, email and search business, the mobile business is now almost negligible for Yahoo's revenue contribution. Yahoo has so far not publicly disclosed data on the mobile business. So it is expected that Yahoo will be able to release this data in its fourth quarterly earnings report, released on January 28.

Of course, Yahoo can also take various measures to curb the trend of decline in revenue, even if the flow of landslides, such as through spending cuts, improve operational efficiency, raise fees, sell assets. In recent years, Yahoo has also been trying to maintain the growth momentum of operating profit margins, but also significant results.

However, Yahoo is facing the biggest challenge is how to improve the home page, email and search for the three major business performance. As Ben Hollowitz, a leading venture capitalist, says, Yahoo must focus on product development rather than nurture and promote corporate culture, which is one of the important steps that Ms. Mayer put forward after she took up Yahoo.

"The most important thing for any tech start-up is to build the highest quality product, at least 10 times times better than the current hot product," Horowitz wrote in a recent blog post. Quality is only two or three times times, is not enough to let users flock to the pursuit of new products. Second, technology start-ups should preempt the market before competitors. "This theory is not only applicable to start-up companies, but also Yahoo and other large companies continue to move forward."