Comments on: Terry Semel vs. Jerry Yang

By: joe

joe — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:22:12 +0000

Interesting info, and sounds about right seeing what we got out of panama in the end. Of course he still collected hundreds of millions as CEO, when really the growth over his entire tenure could have been magnitudes greater under someone who actually knew what they were doing.

By: diorex

diorex — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:13:59 +0000

@ Andrew - could not agree more - Yahoo has allowed short sighted goals like next quarters profits and rolling out competing product (however inferior) interfere with business for to long. I suspect Jerry Yang lost those battles along the way. I may be totally wrong, but I think we would triple our spend overnight with Yahoo if I could do 2 things - filter where my ads show (no overture feeds, no trash parked pages - Google are you listening?) and use the content network only on Yahoo properties.

Until those 2 things happen, I must adjust my bids significantly downward on the whole search network to account for the horrible conversion traffic and opt out of the entire content network which costs Yahoo hundreds of thousand of dollars every month I would otherwise be dieing to spend.

By: Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:48:26 +0000

I had noticed on CNBC last week (?) that there was a group of shareholders trying to oust Terry and shake up the Yahoo board of directors.

I’ve just been scratching my head over all of this looking at it both as an investor and an advertiser. Before Panama PPC ads were ranked by bid, not total revenue. Switching to revenue rankings their profits should have exploaded. Instead they shrunk.

From an advertiser side, Panama is just f***ing annoying. I want to punch my screen every time I set up a new campaign. They have completely screwed up allowing spammers to syndicate the overture feed resulting in boatloads of questionable or fraudulant traffic.

Hell, even on the publisher side of things with YPN it is a disaster. They gave the publishers an ad code and said, US traffic only. Legit publishers who accidently sent 10% of non-US traffic lost their account. Whats so complicated about Yahoo doing geotargeting on their side? This is about as basic as it gets!

Its clear that whoever is steering the ship over at Yahoo has absolutely no clue what they are doing. This should be one of their most profitable times in the entire history of the company and instead they are acting like idiots and missing the most basic stuff.