ON YAHOO! LONG ROAD BACK

INCHING BACK

Well, looks like Yahoo! has driven back from the edge of the cliff from Wall Street's perspective, at least for now (image source). 

It's been a rough few months.

The reaction (via Techmeme) to yesterday's quarterly results have generally been modestly positive.

There seems to be some cautious optimism that the company's new ad system, Panama will kick into higher gear in the second half of the year, after being introduced in the nick of time in recent weeks. 

Here's how Paul Kedrosky summed it up:

"The highlight of the Yahoo conference call tonight has come early:

We ... [expect] revenue per search to begin to improve in the later part of Q2. We actually see Q1 as probably the trough in revenue for search although we started out pretty strong.

So we expect it to trough in Q1 and to start picking up in Q2 with double-digit growth in the back half.

The bulls will be elated, and the bears ... distressed."

In that context, I found the following Alexa graph via Alexaholic, comparing Yahoo!'s daily reach to Google and MSN pretty interesting. 

Putting aside the ongoing debate on the veracity of Alexa numbers for a while, the graph was of interest as a snapshot nevertheless (see Fred Wilson's recent post to get caught up on the debate).

It's interesting to see how the daily traffic flows from the three sites, as measured by Alexa, seem to be converging for now.  Not to mention that MSN.com is in a bit of a very modest upswing.

It's particularly interesting when you add AOL.com to the mix.  Remember them?

They're the green line trudging along the bottom.

Hard to believe that they were the proverbial 69 pound gorilla barely a decade ago.

Here's wishing Yahoo! all the best on the long road ahead.

In that vein, can't wait to see the Alexa chart a decade from now.

(Disclosure:  I remain an investor in Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Time Warner).