About CEO Terry Semel’s $71mm pay package for 2006, despite Yahoo’s 60% decline in net income and 35% decline in stock price during the year. Institutional Shareholder Services and PROXY Governance have urged that shareholders protest the CEO’s pay, which is more than 900% above the median of peers like eBay and Electronic Arts. The amazing thing is that Semel’s $71mm pay represents a steep pay cut from the $231mm he took home in 2005, which shareholders also complained about. Yahoo is quick to cite that Semel “does not receive any perks, pensions or other retirement benefits, severance benefits, or any other deferred compensation, because he can buy his own small fully-staffed country with what we pay him.”
In other news, Google increased its lead on the other search engines in April according to a ComScore report. Google accounted for 67% of all search queries in the month, up from 66.3%. Microsoft held flat at 7.7% but Yahoo slipped from 19.2% to 18.8%. Yahoo’s official response was that the unseasonably cold April caused a slip in Yahoo searches, and that Google users are cold-hearted and full of secrets.
Proxy firms urge protest vote over Semel pay [San Jose Mercury News]
Google extends lead over Yahoo, Microsoft [eWeek]
Yahoo
It turns out you don’t have to be a real estate billionaire’s offspring to get a sense of Ivanka Trump’s huge (and artificial?) tracts of land. Jared Kushner, fellow member of the “Daddy’s a Real Estate Billionaire” club and vaguely heterosexual courter of Ivanka, succumbed to Yahoo’s Indecent Proposal and is letting the winner of the Yahoo Search Marketing Ultimate Connection contest go on an “executive meeting” with his non-girlfriend.
All you need to do is write three 500 word essays (start honing those “unique journey of self-discovery” narratives now) and send them to Yahoo by tomorrow by midnight, and have your guidance counselor fax your transcript.
If your business is small enough (under 99 employees) and wants to team up with the marketing wizards behind Yahoo’s recent surge (closest comparable – the Titanic), enter today. Other prizes include:
-A $25,000 Yahoo! Search Marketing budget to blow on your date with Ivanka
-A power lunch with your marketing mentor high above New York City, who may or may not be a peregrine falcon nesting on the Chrysler building
-Access to your marketing mentor and especially easy access to a Yahoo! Search marketing mentor throughout the year
-A web site makeover from Yahoo! Small Business and FastPivot and Divine-Interventions.com
Yahoo! A Date With Ivanka [webpronews]
The Ultimate Connection Contest [Yahoo]
Yahoo has $1bn sitting around (of its $2.35bn of cash on the balance sheet) and it really wants to buy a social networking site with it. Yahoo’s been slutting this billion around for a couple years now, and it’s been in some abusive relationships. Yahoo’s $1bn courtship of Mark Zuckerberg ended badly, when Zuckerberg said he could do better (it turns out he was right, unless the bubble bursts) and things got weird.
Now Yahoo’s billion is on the rebound and courting British social networking site Bebo, which has 25 million users (measured against the MySpace behemoth of 100 million increasingly believable porn advertisements registered users). According to the British press, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch would rather float the company than sell it.
Yahoo is feeling a bit left out of the internet dealmaking party as of late, especially since the formation of Yacrosoft in a Yahoo/Microsoft merger is seen as (even more) unlikely after Microsoft’s temporary insanity $6bn acquisition of aQuantive.
Yahoo may buy UK’s Bebo for $1 billion: report [MarketWatch]
Microsoft and Yahoo, seen hanging out at Bungalow 8 several times last year (according to the New York Post), are rumored to be in merger talks once again. Spurred by a love of Latin sounding next-gen technological platforms (Vista for Microsoft, Panama for Yahoo), missed or failed acquisition opportunities (mainly by Yahoo with DoubleClick and Facebook) and a desire to do something to stay competitive with Google, the two companies are getting along much better than they used to. The initial dissolution of talks was caused partly by Microsoft online group managers insisting that the company stick with its own online search and ad systems rather than buy Yahoo. Many leaders of those projects are no longer with Microsoft.
Can this actually work or is this the AOL/Time Warner of this decade? Integration of the two companies could be a huge problem. Yahoo has 12,000 employees and a recently reshuffled corporate structure, with a co-founder (Jerry Yang) that is said to dislike Microsoft and actively avoid the use of Microsoft products.
Yahoo shares surged over 20% in after-hours trading yesterday, as the stock closed at just over $28 a share and now sits at over $34. This pushes the market cap of Yahoo to over $38bn. Microsoft’s market cap is closer to $300bn, and the company has about $28bn in cash and short term investments.
Microsoft, Yahoo Reconsider Merger – [WSJ]
Google is about to incorporate an algorithm that changes searches based on the personal information of logged-in users. The change will happen in the coming weeks.
Yahoo disagrees with Google’s approach (and continually surpassing estimates), from the Wall Street Journal:
Yahoo Inc. says it has experimented with using search histories to tailor results for individuals, but it doesn’t favor this approach — at least partly because the results didn’t differ enough for users to see a big impact. Eckart Walther, Yahoo’s vice president of product for Web search, says the company’s research shows there are perils to personalizing search results. “If you get it right, people really like it,” he says. “If you get it wrong, they dislike it even more.”
Should a search engine differentiate between users and alter its service accordingly? Isn’t this a reduction in user control? Are the algorithms taking over? When will a search engine first be charged with discrimination based on provided results? Your thoughts?
Search Engines Seek to Get Inside Your Head – [WSJ via AOL]
[This weekend the Wall Street Journal published an internal document by a Yahoo senior vice-president, Brad Garlinghouse. The letter itself is a plea to Yahoo to regain its focus, and is now famous for complaining that the company was spreading itself like a thin-layer of peanut butter over too many areas.]
Look, Brad. We’re like everyone else. We really want to like you. Everyone who is not now inside of Yahoo knows there is something seriously wrong with the company. So it’s good to know that someone inside knows that too. So we’re not going to mock you relentlessly. Instead, we’re going to give you a couple of tips.
1. You talk about baseball, bleeding and peanut butter. And we get it. You’re trying to make your memorandum memorable with these images. But it’s a bit much. Stick to one image. The peanut butter thing worked. Run with it. (And, to get a bit meta, your inability to stick with one image is kind of like what’s wrong with Yahoo. Focus, lad. Focus.)
2. It’s kind of obvious that you knew this memo would get out to the world. It sounds too much like it was written for public consumption for you to get away with saying you never expected it to get out. But, you know what Brad, that’s a feature, not a bug. These days executives should be writing memos with the idea that they might leak. Because, you know, they probably will. So own the publicity the memo got.
3. Google. Say it, Brad. It’s amazing that your memo doesn’t once mention the big Gee-double-oh-gee-el-ee even once. It’s it verboten at Yahoo? That which may not name? If so, that’s part of the problem. You need to get people talking in the language of the real world rather than taboo-addled corporate speak.
4. Okay. One last thing. You know the part where you write, ” I love Yahoo! I’m proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I’m proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head”? Well, that’s just creepy. Keep your hair removal habits private next time. We totally don’t need to go there.
Your friends at,
DealBreaker.com
“Yahoo Inc.’s efforts to extend its Web reach through an acquisition of Facebook Inc. aren’t making much progress”
“Yahoo’s failure”
“Yahoo faces problems”
“Yahoo’s stock fell sharply”
“These factors reduce the incentives for Facebook’s management, which includes founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, 22 years old, to sell the company now. In an interview last month, Mr. Zuckerberg said there was no sense in saying, “let’s make a lot of money now….I can be doing this for a long time, hopefully.”
Yahoo’s Talks With Facebook Get Bogged Down [WSJ]
Earlier: FaceBook: $2 Billion Ain’t Looking So “Crazy” Now, Is It Yahoo?
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