After spending a lot of time speaking with Yahoo employees, partners, and customers, new CEO Carol Bartz has come to realize the importance of giving consumers a “Wow experience,” she told investors in the first quarter conference call. But they have yet to experience that from owning the stock. Yahoo reported a 13 percent decline in revenues for the first quarter of 2009 to $1.6 billion, while net income dropped 78 percent to $118 million. (more…)

Yahoo Inc. confirmed Tuesday that it will cut 675 jobs, 5 percent of its workforce, as its online advertising business continued to erode in the first quarter amid economic gloom. (more…)

Even as Google is cancelling its experiment with newspaper advertising, Yahoo is expanding its newspaper consortium. Today, Yahoo is announcing that it is adding two new members: The Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times. That brings the consortium up to 38 media companies, representing 793 total newspapers, up from 635 newspaper partners a year ago, and 176 at launch in November, 2006 (more…)

Terry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales “blitz” intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper’s Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year. (more…)

Yahoo’s tab in its efforts to fight off Microsoft last year ran $79 million, according to the company’s filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (more…)

Yahoo could start the week by launching a major reorganization of the company

Internet search giant Yahoo will likely undergo another major reshuffle sometime in the next week, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is looking for several new high-level executives.  The new CEO admitted there are “fundamental issues” that must be dealt with in the coming months if Yahoo is serious about competing with Google in the future. (more…)

“Report” – Yahoo Inc Chief Executive Carol Bartz could announce a major management reorganization as early as next week, according to the blog AllThingsD.

The Wall Street Journal-affiliated blog, citing several sources inside and outside the Internet company, said the revamp would likely come on Wednesday, although it could be pushed out a week or two or rolled out in pieces.

Bartz sent a memo to employees on Friday in which she said, “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie.”

Yahoo officials declined to comment. A source at Yahoo, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said rumors of a reorganization were swirling within the company. (more…)

Yahoo is introducing a new type of search advertising that integrates images and video in paid listings, the company plans to announce Thursday.

Search advertising typically shows only text advertisements and links. Marketers usually devote part of their online budget to search — which shows text-only advertisements and links — and part to display, the banner and box advertisements that show images or video.

By introducing video and images, the new offering from Yahoo, called Rich Ads in Search, gives search some of the advantages of banner advertisements. “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, the vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo. (more…)

A year ago Sunday, on February 1, 2008, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told the world his company wanted to buy Yahoo.

Despite months of discussions, the deal never materialized, distressing many Yahoo shareholders and hastening Yahoo’s replacement of CEO Jerry Yang with Carol Bartz. But what if Yang had gotten up on the other side of the bed one day a year ago and led his company to accept the offer?

It’s impossible to know what would have happened, of course. But an exercise in speculation can be illuminating, as Philip K. Dick showed with The Man In The High Castle, a novel in which Nazi Germany and imperial Japan won World War II.  (more…)