Analysts anticipate that its potential is enormous

Patience and length of time. After two tumultuous years where Yahoo! saw tarnish the brightness of its mark and drop the trust of its shareholders, the former darling of Web work quietly to his renaissance. Yahoo! may emerge to Google as the main beneficiary of the evolution of the advertising market expected over the next years.

The priority of Yahoo! is to improve the growth of its sales from the leader in online, Google advertising. The good news, say analysts, is that society has many strengths for the race turns to his advantage. Sponsored links related to the research, which currently constitute the largest sector of the online advertising market and where Google holds an undisputed advantage, have reached a plateau. Now, the largest gains of growth are to search on the sector of the banners (pictures and videos) where Yahoo! has traditionally dominated. Indeed, as major advertisers will allocate a portion more important for their advertising expenditure in digital media, the possibilities of creating a multi-variate campaigns (banners, videos, sponsored links and mobile platform) will multiply.

"Yahoo! has the opportunity to behave more like a group of media as a web portal, with the advantage to offer complete campaigns declined in multiple formats and across multiple platforms." "Remains it to show that it is able to draw beautiful marks", says Andrew Frank, Vice President of research at Gartner.

Development projects launched last year by the co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, and continued by his successor Carol Bartz, are aimed at advancing Yahoo! in this direction. Intended to consolidate a very fragmented advertising space inventory, advertising platform APT launched last September is thus tested currently to 700 us regional newspapers sites. Analysts anticipate that its potential is enormous. The main handicap is the slowness of the deployment, which will not fail to test the patience of investors.

On the research front, the partnership signed with Microsoft late July means that Yahoo! will subcontract to the software giant all the machinery of the search engine (algorithm, servers, bandwidth, etc.), savings of $ 425 million and improved profitability by 8, according to analysts. Yahoo! thus relinquishes control on its search engine, a technology that offers more than all ways than negligible gains in competitiveness. However, it retains full freedom of action on the front where is going to now play the conquest of the Internet search market: the interface with the user.

Finally, like Facebook, Yahoo! intends to open its platform to the developer community and to benefit its users of thousands of applications deployed by third-parties. "The potential impact of Yahoo OpenSystems is enormous.""But the implementation will take time, because Yahoo! software machine is very heavy," said Karsten Weide of IDC.

Above all, Yahoo! faced a major task: to make a large household in its structure. Carol Bartz also spent most of his efforts since his arrival in January last to the head of the company, eliminating redundant functions and products. In his last note to investors, the Investment Bank analyst Thomas Wiesel warned investors that business transformation of a group as Yahoo! is a long-term effort, both in terms of human and technological structure. Carol Bartz wants for example reducing a quarantine to two the number of employees involved in each trade agreement with the advertisers. Determined to simplify the structure of the group, it has already eliminated many positions of leadership and reduced the workforce by 5. She said late July that the reorganization of the agreement with Microsoft teams take two and a half years, with new layoffs the key.

In this context, the improvements introduced late August in e-mail applications, instant messaging and search have been favourably received by analysts as an indication that the huge ship is restart its engines.

"Yahoo! is not at all a society on the precipice, as financial markets have portrayed." "The operational problems are its major handicap, but the fact that Yahoo! shows that it is again able to evolve its products is an encouraging sign," said Andrew Frank of Gartner.

The dramatic transition that investors are calling for will nevertheless require patience. "Carol Bartz has made so far a journey without fault in all that it has undertaken since his arrival, but it will need more time before results become tangible," confirms Karsten Weide.