It's not looking good for Yahoo.
Its latest financial results, for the second quarter of 2011, showed falling revenues and earnings that were largely down to its stalling displayadvertising business.
Plotted historically, this all starts to look terminal. Overall revenues haven't been this low since the second quarter of 2005, and overlaid with Yahoo's strategic moves away from tech to media, back to tech and then back to media again more recently - as Ross Levinsohn indicated.
Display advertising was once Yahoo's core business, and one it could rely on exploiting. Repeated executive shuffles, low morale and a revenue-sharing agreement in search with Microsoft have all sucked the success out of the company. Yahoo is now faced with sitting back and watching its rivals benefit from the growth in advertising display - not just some serious effort from Google which now outsells Yahoo in display, but also Facebook, which has increased its display ad cost-per-click 74% in the past 12 months. (We can't plot Facebook's revenues here, because it's a private company, but you can bet that it is another of the places that Yahoo's lost revenue has gone to.
Yahoo's stock dropped at the end of the US day but rose again after hours.
