A new CEO still may not save Yahoo
Jeff Horwich: To many, Yahoo has become synonymous with chaos — CEOs coming and going; management lurching from one turnaround strategy to the next. Tomorrow is the annual shareholder meeting, and interim CEO Ross Levinsohn looks likely to get the permanent title. But will anything change?
Here’s Marketplace’s Queena Kim.
Queena Kim: It’s been a crazy couple of months — make that years — at Yahoo, and BGC Financial analyst Collin Gillis is ready for the to drama to stop.
Colin Gillis: It all has a chance to come to an end at the shareholder meeting on Thursday. Put in Ross as the permanent CEO.
“Ross” is Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s acting CEO. He’s focusing Yahoo on its main money makers: content and advertising.
Gillis: The point is incremental change, not wild change.
Gillis says Yahoo gets about 700 million clicks a month. And it made about a billion dollars last year, mostly from selling ads.
But Benchmark Capital analyst Clay Moran says by playing it safe, Yahoo’s lost ground to Google and Facebook.
Clay Moran: They feel like they had a big brand and a lot of cash and they didn’t want to risk that.
Moran says Yahoo needs to make a bold move. His suggestions, buy Hulu the online video site. Or find another way to get in video. But Moran’s not sure Levinsohn is ready to take that risk.
Moran: And so it will be more of the same, which will be received mostly with a yawn.
Not much drama in that.
In San Francisco, I’m Queena Kim for Marketplace.
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