Today has been quite a roller coaster ride for Yahoo — the company put days of reports and rumors to rest this morning when it confirmed that it would acquire the social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and now CEO Marissa Mayer has confirmed that Yahoo’s New York employees will now be moving.

They’ll all soon be working right around the corner from Times Square in the same building that used to house the New York Times (229 West 43rd Street, to be more specific).

The move is meant to unite the nearly 500 Yahoo employees that are currently split among three existing locations in New York City, though Mayer made it very clear that the newly acquired Tumblr team wouldn’t be folks roped into working out of the central office — David Karp and the rest of the team will continue to work out of their 10th floor office near Gramercy Park. This whole thing is reminiscent of Mayer’s edict that saw the end of remote working for long-time Yahooligans. In a memo issued by Yahoo human resources head Jackie Reses back earlier this year, it was revealed the brass though that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

While that’s unlikely to be the case here, Mayer has shown herself to be a vocal proponent of the sort of work that can be done by bringing employees together, and it seems the Yahoo New York team is only slated to grow from there. Just before New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the podium to deliver a few remarks, Mayer noted that the space the team will soon move into can hold an additional 200 or so people, and a post on the official Yahoo Tumblr account (that was fast) indicated that the company wants to pump up its New York staff “by up to 60 percent.”

Of course, this isn’t the only news that Mayer and company have in store for us this evening — some prominent Flickr signage means that there’s some product news in the pipeline as well.

UPDATE: Mayer just pulled back the curtain on the new and improved Flickr, and it is awesome.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After announcing its deal to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash, Yahoo today started to lay out some of the details for how it intends to make use of the property while trying to stick to its promise “not to screw it up.” Expect more advertising by next year as well as more Tumblr content on Yahoo properties, but more of a cautious step as to how Yahoo will deal with some of Tumblr’s more NSFW content.

Here are some of the more interesting details revealed in the call:

What are Tumblr ads going to look like? Tumblr apparently made only $13 million in revenues last year but CEO David Karp apparently thinks the site is “ready” to make more now that it understands its users, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. But she also noted that they will be working from a challenged position, not just because of user resistance but because Karp himself has been “skeptical” about online ads.

In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”

As one example, she pointed to an ad format that Yahoo launched at the end of April, in-stream ads that it runs on its news pages. “On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience,” she said. She cited the Tumblr dashboard, or as she called it, the inbox for the blogs you follow. “Today Tumblr already does some ads in that feed. We would like to look at that and understand how to introduce more ads where the ads fit the expectations and follow that form and function.” She also noted that Yahoo may possibly work with bloggers to provide ads that will be run with their permission.

On top of this, expect to see more search ads: there are also plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality into the site as well. “We think there is a complelling search story,” said Mayer. “Their body is 50b posts and 5 billion posts of original content so search is already vast. We see an opportunity to integrate with search and provide that. That’s one area we are excited by the acquisition.”

Throughout this, a focus on trying to be Tumblr-centric about whatever Yahoo tries to do there. “It’s not a choice between creativity and monetization,” insisted Mayer.

So when are those ads coming? CFO Ken Goldman said that ad revenues from Tumblr will be “modest” this year — the acquisition is not expected to close until the second of of 2013 — but that they will “ramp up” in 2014 “and beyond.” “We do think those revenues will start monetizing materially [and] will contribute to revevenues in 2014 and beyond,” he said on the call, “not just standalone for Tumblr but also incrementally, helping Yahoo to growth.”

Porn? The NSFW, notorious part of Tumblr was never referred to by name, but an analyst did ask about what Yahoo, while courting mainstream brands to market to that attractive Tumblr audience, would do about content that is not “brand safe”. “The richness and breadth of the content… is what makes it more exciting,” enthused Mayer. “In terms of addressing concerns around brand safety we need to have good tools for retargeting.” [Another acquisition, methinks? In any case, no outright announcement that Yahoo intends to get rid of all those sites that Tumblr has more or less accepted into the fold.]

Mayer continued: “Tumblr is now at the point that they do know what it is and what makes sense to monetize in way that is tasteful.” She also mentioned due diligence but also something else, effectively implying that Yahoo will figure out a way of getting around the NSFW content and serving ads where they want them to go, because that’s what the advertisers want: “There are a lot of marketers eager to participate in Tumblr platform and the demographics,” she said.

What does the $1.1 billion “substantially in cash” mean? Goldman noted that it’s effectively an all-cash deal, save for some shares in Yahoo for David Karp. He also noted that Yahoo still has “ample cash” for more acquisitions and investments, to the tune of about $6.2 billion. These will not likely be along the lines of Tumblr in terms of size. “This is an exceptional company and team,” she said of Tumblr. At 300 million monthly unique users, Yahoo is paying about $3.67 per user for the acquisition.

Complementary properties. Mayer made a lot of the fact that Tumblr and Yahoo actually fit “really beautifully together,” like South America and Africa, in her words. In addition to Yahoo skewing older and Tumblr skewing younger, “We are strong on sports, finance and news; Tumblr’s strong on architeture, travel and fashion. We need great tools for content publishing and creation. They have them. Tumblr prides itself as a home for brands. Yahoo is all about brands.”

Tumblr comes to Yahoo. While a lot of the expectation so far has been about how Yahoo may mess up or spiff up or monetize up Tumblr, another theme that emerged during the call was the idea of Tumblr content going out to Yahoo properties — a way of attracting users to Yahoo that may not have gone there before.

“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo. I imagine engagement will improve as we incorporate that content.”

Flickr. There is a separate news conference today that will likely concentrate on updates to Flickr, but today Mayer appeared to douse out speculation that it will be a move to begin integrating its online photo site with Tumblr in any way: “In terms of how the content of Tumblr evolves it depends on the creators,” Mayer said in answer to a question of what this acquisition will mean for Flickr. “It’s something that we will turn our attention to in the future. It will provide great storage, but we will see how those two cousins should relate to each other.

Image: Tumblr (where else)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been genuinely surprised by the depth and reach of the reaction to any moves made by Yahoo! As someone who hasn’t been around the this place for too long, my sense is Yahoo!, despite its recent history of countless missteps, is still vitally important to the cultural memory of Silicon Valley. And, as a result, the moves its new CEO makes becomes the subject of ridiculously intense, global scrutiny, armchair speculation and analysis, and a deafening level of peanut gallery twitter blabber devoid of any reason or context.

Let’s *briefly* recap the multiple serious issues facing Yahoo up to mid-2012. There were years of board mismanagement. Musical chairs in the CEO’s office. The company abandoned search. The portal still resembles a digital media site while today’s hottest properties delivered personalized newsfeeds. An identity crisis of whether its a media company versus a technology company, the one which gave Hadoop to the world. An activist investor who rightly blasted the original board of directors and leadership. While their display ads are profitable, they won’t be able to target them as much as other properties. While Yahoo! may still wield a huge global Consumer Internet brand and act as the portal to the web for a massive audience worldwide, it remains unclear how much growth is left for a company already worth around $20B and one that turned down a juicy $45B offer from Microsoft in 2008.

Yahoo! has a secret weapon, however, and her name is Marissa Mayer.

I say “secret” for a specific reason. Now, it’s obvious to point out the company’s powerful CEO – given how well-known Mayer is, but the following bears repeating: Very, very, very few people in the entire world possess her level of operational experience, product intuition, and deep technical networks. People seem to forget these facts, instead choosing to focus on cafeteria policies. Put another way, more bluntly — only a very small handful of people possess the depth of experience she holds, building products for hundreds of millions of consumers and growing up inside one of the Valley’s most iconic, storied, and successful companies from the the beginning. Period.

The reason I’m devoting my column to this tired, overplayed topic to remind all of us just how rare her experience is. Now, let’s briefly review what Mayer has accomplished in less than a year as Chief Yahoo, in no particular order. She recruited a new CFO & COO. She added Max Levchin to the Board (which again, was originally shaken up by Loeb). She helped engineer a partial sale of Yahoo’s position in Alibaba, netting the company much-need liquidity. She helped steer a redesign of the main homepage and taken steps toward personalization of the newsfeed — anyone who has helped redesign a site even for a small company knows how political this task can be. She closed the acquisitions of Stamped, Snip.it, and OntheAir, smartly scooping up excess talent, especially for mobile, in an environment that has too many fledgling and inconsequential startups to begin with. She is drawing more positive attention for Yahoo! than anyone before her, even using Twitter and Flickr herself to communicate with the community. She improved cafeteria conditions (which also makes it more inviting for visitors). She gave employees iPhones. In about eight months since her installment as CEO, Yahoo’s market cap is up roughly 25% with around $4B in liquid assets and fewer than the 14,000+ employees she began with — and that number may come down again as her new “Work From Work” policy takes effect.

The facts above speak for themselves. In less than a year, Mayer has engineered a series of small victories on what could be a very long journey to turning around the big ship that is Yahoo. It may not even be possible to turnaround, but things are much better now. In the future, I’d broadly expect to see further downsizing (including parts of international), more data partnerships alongside their existing relationship with Facebook, many more talent acquisitions as seed-funded companies slowly die off, which will hopefully tie-in to investment in their mobile app ecosystem to extend their consumer-facing brands globally. For instance, given how hard mobile app distribution is today, Yahoo’s audience and brand could drive even more downloads on both iOS and Android if the company properly invested in this direction. Of course, on Quora there are great, detailed threads with suggestions for Yahoo’s CEO and if it can be saved at all.

Yahoo is a $20B that makes about $1B/year in profit. And, it has been in turbulent waters for years. Now, for the past eight months under the stewardship and steering of Mayer, Yahoo seems to be a good track relative to years past. This isn’t your average turnaround situation. Yahoo is a big ship that will take many more months to turn direction. We don’t know where the winds will take the company, but if the last eight months are any indication, I’m optimistic.

Interestingly, it’s Mayer’s presence that intensifies all the chatter. The Valley — and the world — cannot help but watch, which reinforces the fact that despite what popular sentiment may say, Yahoo! still matters to the web and still matters to the Valley, at least for now. But, Yahoo! needs to be turned-around and reinvented. This is Mayer’s clear purpose, and therefore she has the implicit mandate to engineer this by any means necessary. She’s trying to fix morale and culture in her own way. We can expect further reductions in force. She and the company are also under pressure to create a new property to demonstrate Yahoo! can still create. From my point of view, it will be exciting to see unfold, and I have no doubt when her tenure is complete, Mayer will have left Yahoo! in significantly better than shape than we she inherited it.

Photo Credit: Rachael Voorhees / Creative Commons Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Marissa Mayer has succeeded. In getting people to have an opinion about Yahoo again. While many are skewering Mayer for not being progressive with her work-from-home “ban,” people who are more familiar with what exactly is going on are quietly singing her praises.

Mayer will be putting the official smackdown on remote workers come June. People with a work-from-home agreement will have to report to a local office in the region by then, or else. People who have an agreement to work one or two days from home are strongly encouraged to spend those days in the office — a more subtle “ban” that will affect their performance ratings.

“I have been at Yahoo for four years and let’s just say the house needed and still needs a lot of cleaning up. Marissa is doing just that,” wrote an anonymous Yahoo employee on Quora. “People will use the argument that look at Google and how it allows employees to work from home … We are fighting to stay relevant. So getting your ass into the office and working on projects is not too much to ask.”

A non-tragic ending for Yahoo may justify Mayer’s means. As Chris Dixon and others point out, discouraging working from home at Yahoo and discouraging workers from working from home at other, more on-track tech companies like Google are two different things.

There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s Patrick Ewing, who also had friends who cheated the system. The fact that the Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is why you can’t have nice things.

We also spoke to a couple of former and current employees, and while some are sniping at the inconvenience, the move was clearly necessary. According to one source, Mayer explained the rationale at Yahoo’s “Friday FYI,” its equivalent of Google’s TGIF. ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” she apparently said.

First world problems: Your boss requires that you actually show up at work.—
Fake Alexia (@alexia_tsotsis) February 26, 2013

So it’s not that Mayer doesn’t get all the studies on workplace productivity, mobile workforce, etc. It’s not that she doesn’t get that going into the office can be a major distraction. She does. It’s not that there aren’t legitimately productive work-from-homers, like the new mom who spends all day at the computer but needs to check in on her kid from time to time. It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without actually doing any work ruined it for everyone.

In the last four years, Yahoo has gone through five CEOs — An easy environment for people to hide and get lost under the rug. People get away with not working on a single project. And managers are just as guilty as their employees of cheating the system: One VP was given a 100% retention bonus after Scott Thompson laid off everyone… And ended up playing tennis and going to the gym most of the time.

“They simply hired the wrong people over the years and had no metrics to track performance/etc,” one former employee told me. There’s been some internal speculation that the ban will allow the company to lay employees off without paying severance packages, or just get more people to quit in general. “This really is a necessary part of cutting out the cancer that is Yahoo’s current performance,” the same person emphasized. “And while it’s a horrible mess, it’s sadly necessary.”

Image via Ashley Mayer and @mm

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s that time of year to be festive and spooky, carve up some pumpkins and get the candy ready for the neighborhood kids. One uber-geek Ashley Mayer, decided to take the festivity to an all new level, tied in with her love of a particular social app — Path.

Yes, it’s Halloween, let’s get geekily creative.

I have tattoos that feature certain company logos, but this is dedication at an all new level.

This display is nothing short of impressive:

10 points to whomever can guess my plan for these. http://t.co/aMfFbeLa

—
Ashley Mayer (@ashleymayer) October 27, 2012

Royal flush, bitches. http://t.co/0P8WP0Gg

—
Ashley Mayer (@ashleymayer) October 27, 2012

I call them “Pathkins.” She told me that it “TOOK FOREV” to make them.

For reference, here are the Path emoticons (thanks Gwendall):

Well done, Ashley.

[Feature image credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company in July after more than a decade at Google, continues to staff out key positions as she builds her new senior management team. The latest hire is former Google colleague, Henrique de Castro, who will take the role of chief operating officer with responsibility for strategic and operational management of Yahoo’s sales, operations, media and business development worldwide.

Reuters notes that de Castro will be eligible for a $58 million total compensation package, based on an SEC filing by Yahoo. De Castro’s base salary is $600,000, along with an annual bonus of up to 90 percent of that amount. He also receives $36 million in restricted stock units and stock options as a one-time retention award.

At Google, de Castro was VP of its worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, responsible for advertising platforms and services for Mountain View’s publisher and commerce partners. Prior to that, he led Google’s media, mobile and platforms organization. He has also worked for Dell, where he managed sales and business development operations across Western Europe, and consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he advised numerous clients across many different industries. His career also includes senior positions in private equity and advertising businesses.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo’s strong leadership team,” said Mayer in a statement. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

Commenting on his new role, de Castro added in a statement: ”The combination of Yahoo’s unique properties with high quality content, its renewed focus on outstanding user experience and its massive reach bring tremendous value to users, advertisers and partners. This is a pivotal point in Yahoo’s history, and I believe strongly in the opportunity ahead. I can’t wait to join Marissa and the team and get started.”

Yahoo said de Castro will join the company on or before January 22, 2013 — or as soon as he has satisfied his obligations to his current employer.

Early last month Mayer hired private equity exec Jacqueline Reses to lead hiring and HR for Yahoo, and back in August she appointed former Lockerz CEO and Amazon VP, Kathy Savitt, as Yahoo’s new chief marketing officer. Late last month Yahoo also named a new chief financial officer, Ken Goldman, who joined from Fortinet, a provider of threat management technologies.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch has obtained a secret copy of what may be a mockup for the new Yahoo home page. Yesterday, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer shared her broad vision for the future of the Internet company with employees.

According to AllThingsD, Mayer didn’t share specific plans for fixing search and email or an “in-process and dramatic home page redesign.” While ATD reporter Kara Swisher seems to have the phones at Yahoo bugged, and perhaps a @yahoo-inc.com email address, she hasn’t been able to get a peek at the redesign. Yahoo has also been cracking down on leaks, but that didn’t stop us.

Click on the image below to open the screenshot in a new window:

Yes, the new home page looks a lot like the home page of Google, Mayer’s former employer. In fact Mayer, who was Google employee number 20, oversaw the famous clean, plain white search home page at Google. We’ve also heard that she was responsible for the longest time with no changes on that home page. So the new Yahoo home page mockup is not that surprising.

Mayer has been borrowing many ideas from her years at Google including a focus on product and data, free food in the cafeteria, and weekly “FYI” meetings like Google’s “TGIF” meetings. She is also approving all company hires, just like the Google co-founders.

Mayer has already removed some ads from the home page according to AllThingsD. But this new ad-free home page design is a surprise and a risk since the Yahoo home page generates substantial ad revenue for the company.

The new home page features links for key areas that Yahoo plans to double-down on, including Search, Mobile, and Social. It also has links to the reported 4 C’s that are part of Mayer’s goals for talent at Yahoo: culture, company goals, calibration, and compensation.

If you are not logged in, Yahoo’s home page first top nav button is “You!”, similar to Google’s “+You.”

Note also that Yahoo is dropping the ® symbol from their logo, which was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this month. But, not the ! symbol.

Hopefully, Mayer also has a good sense of humor. I’ve heard she has a good laugh.

Special thanks to Google Chrome’s developer tools for making this post possible.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Company culture, like almost everything else, is accelerated and concentrated in Silicon Valley.

It looks like Flickr may be getting some much-needed love from its corporate parent Yahoo — Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer just created an account on the photo-sharing site.

That may not seem like a big deal, but neither Carol Bartz nor Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s past two CEOs, had a publicly visible Flickr account, as noted by early Flickr evangelist Thomas Hawk. Symbolically, at least, that suggested Flickr wasn’t a top priority for them. So even though Mayer’s account only holds a single corporate headshot right now, it still feels like a meaningful gesture.

Hawk was actually the first to spot Mayer’s new account, which he said “sends a powerful and positive message both to Flickr’s staff as well as to Flickr’s users.”

And Mayer’s interest appears to go beyond just creating an account. Blogger Robert Scoble claims that Mayer has doubled the size of the Flickr team in the past week. And Hawk points out the team is still hiring, with a number of open positions.

I’ve emailed Yahoo PR to confirm that the account really is Mayer’s and that she has grown the Flickr team. Of course, even if it’s all true, that doesn’t guarantee Flickr will actually manage a comeback. But it does suggest that at the very least, Mayer intends to try.

[top photo spotted at the Yahoo campus]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Less than a month after taking over Yahoo, Marissa Mayer is already sending strong signals of leadership to investors. Yet, the announcement of a new financial strategy led to a 5.37 percent downturn of YHOO today as the company played down dividend expectations.

Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the strategy review “may lead to a re-evaluation of, or changes to, our current plans.”

In particular, following the announcement in May that Yahoo would sell half of its 40 percent stake in the Chinese company Alibaba for $7.1 billion, investors believed that the after-tax cash proceeds — $4.2 billion — would go back to investors in the form of dividends.

Shareholders rejoiced, but with another CEO came another plan. Mayer has just scrapped the plan of distributing dividends in order to “enhance long-term shareholder value” as she wrote in the SEC filing. According to Reuters, the board of directors still backs Mayer’s long-term plans.

In addition to the new dividend plan, the French news agency AFP reported that the business review could lead to “revaluating or rethinking our current plans, including our company reorganization and our share buyback program”.

Once again, Mayer is borrowing some ideas from Google, her previous company. Google is known for not issuing dividends to its shareholders. By doing that, she gives the impression that she is in charge of Yahoo and ready to take bold decisions. But investors seem to value short-term returns over a long-term vision.

Now, we are left wondering what Yahoo will do with this cash on hand. It could acquire some companies, invest it or keep it for a while.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch