Yahoo! stock plummets as CEO says ad sales are slowing

[alexplank]

TechCrunch reports:

Are the chickens about to come home to roost? Is the recent explosion of innovation on the web made possible only by an advertising market that isn’t sustainable? Are all the exciting new tools coming online subsidized at best by tried and true sectors like news and the ads bought against it for things like automobiles and financial services? Will a weakened Yahoo! finally get scooped up by Microsoft or another major player in both a vindication of old school computing and preparation for the future?

I think we shouldn't worry too much about one advertiser not getting enough advertising deals. On a whole, it seems like the industry is still expanding.

[Robert Allen]

Technically, good news. We need to bring some of these companys down to size.

Robert

[alexplank]

Originally Posted by Robert Allen

Technically, good news. We need to bring some of these companys down to size.

Robert

Interesting take. Do you mean to say that bringing "these companies down to size" is good because it will help to prevent another bubble? Or do yo think this will benefit publishers and advertisers by forcing the big companies to treat them more fairly?

[www.AmCy.org]

Temporary slump, IMO, because the economy is slowing. X-Mas season will be here before you know it, which should help many ad categories.

Here's a snippet from today's Wall Street Journal:

Yahoo, Google Inc. and others have thrived in recent years as advertisers have redirected dollars to target consumers on the Web. Spending on online ads has surged from $6 billion in 2002 to $12.5 billion last year and is on pace to set a new record this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group.

Y! getting scooped up by M$? I don't think so. Y! is still a powerhouse, IMO.

[sachin410]

The stock is near its two year lows and doesn't look rosy.



As a company, it is not as innovative as Google and has failed to come up with anything exciting in the recent years. The search engine and YPN also need a lot of improvements. I don't see much growth for Yahoo in the coming years if things continue as they are right now.

[Arizona Web Design]

Their site / network still has the most traffic on the web. They're also buying up some cool "2.0" sites such as flickr and del.icio.us, and launching popular products like Yahoo! Answers.

These strategies should help keep them ahead of the social web, which is obviously on a huge growth pattern (think MySpace, FaceBook, etc etc).

The web is changing, and Yahoo! tends to be right there in the mix... consistently. Slowing ad sales is probably more a result of the poor traffic (social traffic and people who frequent sticky and / or fun sites tend to convert poorly).

Either way, I wouldn't worry about Yahoo! If worse comes to worse, as a company they are going to have to deal with ONLY being profitable in the hundreds of millions. That's not a bad fate if you ask me.

The web continues to grow, sometimes faster than other times, and sometimes it seems like it pulls back (think bubble) but it never stopped growing. I think it's only the outside fringes like VCs and start ups that really get creamed when the growth slows for a few months or years to a more reasonable pace. The big 3 or 4 (if you count ask) will be fine for some time.

[ablaye]

The market was down today. It was a real bad day. Yahoo wasn't the only company that was hit. I think it'll go back up a bit tomorrow.