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Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr. How’s it going to make its money back?

A bunch of ways, Marissa Mayer explained on a conference call today. But if you’re a Tumblr user who was hoping that they didn’t involve putting more ads on your free blogging service, well … don’t read on.

Still reading? Okay! So: Don’t be surprised when you see more ads on your dashboard, and/or some of the Tumblrs you visit.

First, the stakes: Yahoo says it doesn’t expect Tumblr to generate meaningful money for the Web giant this year. But next year, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman says, “we do expect this to enhance EBITDA and revenue.” And prior to the Tumblr deal, J.P. Morgan estimated that Yahoo would generate $1.7 in EBITDA on $4.65 billion in revenue in 2014.

In other words: It takes a lot of money to move Yahoo’s needle. And Yahoo thinks Tumblr — which generated all of $13 million last year — will do that within the next 20 months.

On to the ads: Yes, Tumblr users. You’re going to see more of them. Here’s Mayer, with a preview, via a Wall Street conference call this morning:

“On Tumblr, there’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that is meaningful and really addititive to the user experience.

For example, Tumblr has what’s called the “dashboard”, which is their version of the newsfeed — or in old school terms, an “inbox” for the blogs you follow. So basically different bloggers that you follow can all appear there in your feed.

And today, Tumblr already does some advertising, though minimal, in that feed. We would like to look at them and understand how we could introduce ads — in a very light ad load — where the impact is really created, because the ads really fit the users’ expectations and follow the form and function of the dashboard.

We also see some opportunities to possibly work with bloggers who want ads, to provide ads on their Websites. That would always be done with the blogger’s permission”

Again, Yahoo has promised “not to screw up” Tumblr, and there are plenty of cautionary tales to help them avoid doing that right away. So I wouldn’t expect a flood of ads swamping Tumblr in the next year or so.

On the other hand: It’s a free Web product, which means it’s not really free at all. So if you’re using it, you’re going to pay with your eyeballs. You’re not surprised, right?

Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr
Promises not to screw it up

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & NEW YORK — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Tumblr announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr.

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day. Its tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! is expected to grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent.

The deal offers unique opportunities for both companies. Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.

Total consideration is approximately $1.1 billion, substantially all of which is payable in cash.

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands – established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

“I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of the creator. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve ever worked with,” continued Mayer. “David’s respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome. I’m absolutely delighted to have him join our team.”

David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, addressed the Tumblr community, “Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo! and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has her own announcement, where she repeats most of the same information from the official memo, but also includes an animated GIF.

And here’s Tumblr founder David Karp’s memo, which is even more … Tumblrier.

News!

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing.

So what’s new? Simply, Tumblr gets better faster. The work ahead of us remains the same — and we still have a long way to go! — but with more resources to draw from.

Yahoo is the original Internet company, and Marissa and her team share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. I couldn’t be more excited to have her help. We also share a vision for Tumblr’s business that doesn’t compromise the community and product we love. Plus both our logos end with punctuation!

As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down.

Fuck yeah,
David

According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s other many content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that’s is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for both Tumblr employees, as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” the source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

Billion-dollar-plus price tag? Check!

Yes, all of that describes the Yahoo-Tumblr deal. And it also describes Google’s move to buy YouTube in the fall of 2006.

Which doesn’t mean the two deals are parallel, of course. For starters, the $1.6 billion Google spent on YouTube was a drop in the bucket for the search engine. But $1.1 billion is spending is a very big chunk of Yahoo’s cash pile.

And even back in 2006 it was clear that video would be a crucial part of the Web. You can’t use the same certainty when you talk about cat GIFs.

More important is that, then and now, Google viewed YouTube as a nice complement to its core business, which has never flagged. For Marissa Mayer, it’s a crucial part of her strategy to bring new eyeballs to a faded brand.

Still! Fun to compare and contrast.

Here’s what we know about Tumblr: It’s seven years old, has a lot of users, and last year it lost money on $13 million in revenue. And for YouTube: It turns eight tomorrow, is reportedly on track to generate $4 billion in revenue this year*, and Google executives keep murmuring that it either is or could be profitable.

More interesting for today: Here’s what YouTube’s financials looked like for a two-year period ending August 2006 — shortly before Google bought it (the document comes courtesy of the never-ending Viacom-YouTube copyright fight). Note the sharp uptick in revenue, users and costs at the end. Perhaps Yahoo saw something similar:

youtube pl

*As with all YouTube revenue estimates, take Morgan Stanley’s most recent one with a big chunk of salt.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. As AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka were first to report this week, Yahoo is seriously thinking about buying hipster blogging service Tumblr. In fact, Yahoo’s board is scheduled to consider a $1.1 billion all-cash deal on Sunday.
2. Google wanted to dominate the headlines this week during the company’s annual I/O conference … just maybe not like this. By sending Microsoft a cease-and-desist, they helped promote that rival’s anti-Google campaign.
3. That little drama didn’t come up during the official proceedings of I/O, but a lot else did. Here’s a rundown of all the news Google announced in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote.
4. Watch this: An interview with Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft founder talks about his longtime relationship with Steve Jobs, on “60 Minutes.”
5. Can productivity apps for the iPad make it as useful as a traditional work PC? Walt Mossberg puts them to the test.
6. Speaking of the iPad, the Justice Department is closing in on Apple with an e-book price fixing case … but one of the seemingly most damning pieces of evidence, a line from a letter from Steve Jobs to James Murdoch, is a little less damning in context.
7. Web video services like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. But is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead? A new report says: Nope!
8. BlackBerry is bringing its messenger application, BBM, to iPhones and Android phones this summer. But is it too late?
9. Cisco’s earnings only barely beat analysts’ expectations this week, but that beat sent the company’s stock up 9 percent in after-hours trading. Arik Hesseldahl got CEO John Chambers on the phone to talk about where Cisco is and where it’s going.
10. And lastly, if you want more battery life out of your iPhone on the go, you may have considered a special re-juicing case. Product reviewer Lauren Goode tries the battery boosters before you buy.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

But if you want to make the “pro” case for the deal, here’s how to do it: Pretend that Yahoo is Facebook, and Tumblr is Instagram.

The Facebook/Instagram deal is just over a year old, which means it’s still pretty early to gauge it. But so far it seems to have worked perfectly.

Facebook promised that Instagram would operate autonomously after the acquisition, and from the outside it appears to have kept that promise. People who read sites like this know that the two companies are linked, but lots of other people don’t, which is a huge plus for Instagram. (See: Parents who won’t let their kids use Facebook, but are okay with Instagram. For giggles, tell them the two are owned by the same company, and watch their faces turn ashen.)

And we’ve yet to see Instagram clutter up with lots of ads — or any ads at all. Result: The app is still growing like a weed, which helps mollify critics who worry about Facebook’s inevitable slowdown.

So that sounds like a pretty good model, right? Can Yahoo do the same thing with Tumblr?

Maybe. Tumblr is a much more mature company than Instagram, with a much bigger infrastucture. Kevin Systrom had about a dozen employees when he sold his company. After keeping his staff super lean for many years, David Karp has been on a hiring spree, and Tumblr’s head count is on track to hit something like 200 this year, with its own sales staff. So it will be harder to just tuck that away in the Yahoo org chart.

The crucial difference between the two scenarios, though, has less to do with the seller than the buyer.

Facebook bought Instagram because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to remove an obstacle. If Marissa Mayer buys Tumblr, it’s because she’ll be looking for a boost.

That makes it much less likely that she’ll be able to resist leaving Tumblr alone, and letting it figure out how to sell ads. Zuckerberg can drop a billion (or so) on Instagram, leave it unmonetized for a year, and Wall Street shrugs. Hard to imagine investors reacting the same way to this one.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught.

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million.

In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders.

Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site.

But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source.

That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo.

Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that audience is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocket ship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn and/or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards.” That’s the equivalent of running ads in a Facebook user’s News Feed or a Twitter user’s main feed.

Initial signs are promising. Tumblr told Forbes that it generated $13 million in revenue last year, and suggested it could do as much as $100 million this year; people close to the company say its momentum has continued this year.

In addition to figuring out its top-line business, Tumblr and its backers have also been spending a long time trying to figure out a managment structure. Even Karp’s strongest backers say that the 26-year-old needs help running the company, and for months they have been looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg”-style COO candidate.

“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”

Possibility of death by wildfire aside, sources said that the search has yielded two or three candidates that Tumblr is considering. It is a key hire since the company needs to build out an extensive infrastructure quickly, given its sharp consumer growth, including fielding a more robust advertising team. Tumblr hired an experienced exec, Lee Brown, from Groupon last fall, who has been busy hiring more sales execs. Interesting aside: Brown was a longtime Yahoo ad exec.

But building out the needed structure at the company is a long slog, and Tumblr might be seeking more help one way or another.

Yahoo declined comment and Tumblr has not gotten back to us as yet.

For now, it seems a fairly basic integration of Twitter accounts and actual tweets into Yahoo’s flowing news-content stream; think of it as seeing some select Twitter items placed in between the curated Yahoo News stories.

“Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a company blog post. “From music to sports, news to entertainment, we’re committed to delivering our users the very best of the web, and our continued partnership with Twitter is an exciting leap forward in our endeavors.”

That makes sense, considering how Twitter has been treated in recent times by the news media itself. Think of recent major media events like the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt: News actually broke on Twitter before news organizations were able to get to the scene and cover what was going on, and many outlets — including CNN and other live broadcast networks — were directing users to tweets to tell them what was going on.

Of course, this gets into an entire debate on the accuracy and role of social media in ongoing news coverage, but we’ll sidestep that one for now.

It’s also a win for Twitter, which basically gets a bunch of free distribution of its tweets on Yahoo’s main news page. Yahoo News still has a massive audience. If folks who aren’t already using Twitter return to Yahoo’s news stream daily and continue to see tweets and Twitter accounts, that’s easy potential for converting new users over to the social platform.

As far as Yahoo’s benefit, you might want to note how many times Marissa Mayer said that tweets will be “personalized” in that particular blog post. “Personalization” has been Yahoo’s huge pitch to court users into making Yahoo their destination site for the Web, including signing them up for Yahoo profiles. The more Yahoo can tout a personalized experience tailored to what the user wants, the better that pitch becomes over time.

It’s not clear right now if having a signed-in Yahoo profile connected to your Twitter account will affect what tweets will appear in that news feed, but I’d imagine if Mayer wants to claim true personalization, that would be a good way to do it.

It’s also not clear if Yahoo News editors are curating the tweets themselves, or if they’ll have their news algorithms do the work (we’ve asked Yahoo for clarification). Update 1:21 p.m. PST: Here we go — a Yahoo spokesperson provides me with clarification on this: “The initial list of content sources was editorially curated for relevance and quality, but the Tweets shown on the homepage have been algorithmically selected. The pool of eligible Tweets is further filtered to minimize spam and undesirable content.”

A question: Does this partnership mean we could see tweets appear inside of Yahoo’s search results someday?

No telling exactly, but Yahoo certainly leaves the door open: “We do not currently display Tweets in our search results, but we deeply value our partnership with Twitter and are always looking into ways we can integrate Twitter into our products,” a Yahoo spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Expect to see the tweets roll out in the Yahoo News feed on the desktop and mobile Web in the coming days.

Because I get bored on Sunday nights, I opened up Yahoo’s recent regulatory filings for some light reading and, as usual, found some tasty information that the company had kindly dropped in for my erudition, but declined to call my attention to.

Namely, that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is paying not so very much for its mobile acquisitions, according to several documents the company has filed.

In fact, Yahoo’s average price paid for each of five of the 10 startups it has purchased since last fall is a tiny $3.2 million in cash.

For example, here’s last week’s 10-Q referring to three of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisitions — content curation app Snip.it, which Yahoo bought in January (funding amount unknown, but the $10 million acquisition price reported by some sites is clearly wrong, as you will see from the filing); recommendation app Alike (funding amount unknown), which was on February’s menu; and recommendation app Jybe (funding amount unknown), which the company picked up in mid-March:

The Company did not make any acquisitions during the three months ended March 31, 2012. However, during the three months ended March 31, 2013, the Company acquired three companies, all of which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $10 million and consisted entirely of cash consideration, primarily allocated to goodwill. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed during the three months ended March 31, 2013 did not have a material impact on the Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements.

Going back further, Yahoo’s purchase of recommendation app Stamped last October (it had $3 million in funding) and video-chat app OnTheAir ($880,000 in funding) in December were also on the cheap — a bargain at $6 million total — according to its 10-K filed a few months ago:

During the year ended December 31, 2012, the Company acquired two companies, which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $7 million. The total cash consideration of $7 million less cash acquired of $1 million resulted in a net cash outlay of $6 million. Of the total purchase price, $6 million was allocated to goodwill and $1 million to cash acquired. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed in 2012 did not have a material impact on the Company’s consolidated financial statements, and therefore pro forma disclosures have not been presented.

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo reveals as to the price, and how it will account for the late March acquisition of Britain’s news reader Summly, which AllThingsD reported was a loftier $30 million.

The Summly deal did not appear to have closed by the end of the quarter, so no purchase information has been released, although it will be soon enough, along with that of the more recent string of mobile buys by Yahoo: To-do app Astrid, social polling app GoPollGo, travel rewards app MileWise and mobile gaming studio Loki.

For those four tiny companies, which were doubtlessly also bought for very little, Yahoo did tout what it’s really after in a festive tweet on Friday.

Warm entrepreneurial bodies:

We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team. Welcome to Yahoo! @astrid @gopollgo @milewise @lokistudios!

— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) May 10, 2013

Update 9:29 am PT: And Casey has confirmed his new job via Twitter: “It’s official, I’m a Yahoo! Excited and honored to join @marissamayer and @yahoo,” he wrote, attaching a Path picture (appropriate!) of Yahoo’s welcome sign.

For the past year and a half he has been at Path, Casey was responsible for recruiting the product management team, managing Path’s product road map process — including the most recent introduction of Path’s messaging feature — and developing product strategies to increase growth, retention and revenue, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before Path, Casey spent the better part of a decade at Google in various roles, first beginning in marketing and then moving over to product management roles via special products. He led and developed Google’s real-time search team, and also worked to drive growth on the Google+ social product. (He also happens to be a former professional cyclist, riding alongside Lance Armstrong before retiring in 2003, when he subsequently joined Google.)

The move over to Yahoo makes sense, as Casey worked closely with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer during their shared tenures at Google. It is not clear what he will be doing in his new position, but Mayer has been looking hard for good product leads, and has been trying to recruit Casey over to Yahoo for some time. One source said that Casey could be heading to Yahoo’s “Platforms” division, where he would report to SVP Jay Rossiter.

Update 10:17 a.m. PT: And confirmed again! A Yahoo spokeswoman told AllThingsD that Casey starts today as a senior director in the platform organization.

Path did not respond to emails and phone requests for comment late Sunday evening.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

At an April 12 meeting in Mr. Montebourg’s Paris office, the minister told Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Henrique de Castro, and France Télécom’s chief financial officer, Gervais Pellissier, that he didn’t want 75 percent of a rare French Internet success story to be sold to an American Web giant, according to people briefed on the meeting.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

As I had reported last fall that she might, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has officially joined the board of Jawbone, the high-profile wireless gadget maker whose nifty products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands, according to sources at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Mayer has already attended a board meeting of the San Francisco-based startup, added those sources. She had been talking to Jawbone about becoming a director since before she became the top exec at Yahoo.

As I have previously written, it is a good fit.

The former Google exec is well known for her product chops and also her deep interest in tony aesthetics and high-level design — qualities that Jawbone is well known for. And the addition of Mayer to the board of Jawbone will add someone with experience in scaling businesses from small to large, as well as deeper technical expertise.

She has been an active angel investor in start-ups, and currently is on the board of Walmart Stores and several cultural institutions in San Francisco and New York.

Jawbone has a lot of funding, having raised about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

Interestingly, Mayer and Jawbone CEO and founder Hosain Rahman attended Stanford University at the same time.

I have emails into Yahoo and Jawbone, and await comment.

On Monday, Yahoo rolled out a new version of its flagship mobile app for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Its marquee feature: Quick news-story summaries delivered via Summly’s natural-language algorithms.

There are other improvements onboard as well, including better video and image search, and enhanced personalization. But the Summly integration is the big deal here, and not only for its inclusion, but just how quickly Yahoo pulled it off. Obviously, development of the new app was well under way before the Summly acquisition, but the speed with which Yahoo was able to integrate the startup’s technology into the app is impressive indeed, and suggests that Yahoo has become a bit more nimble under new CEO Marissa Mayer.

At a human resources conference yesterday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer finally commented on the massive controversy generated after the Silicon Valley Internet company decided to end its work-from-home offering to its employees.

News of the change came in February after AllThingsD published a hopelessly awkward memo on the new dictate that resulted in a firestorm of debate.

That was no surprise, since the missive was confusingly penned by HR head Jackie Reses, who noted, in part: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” Along with an incomprehensible aside about the “cable guy,” there were few details.

And because Yahoo PR’s goal is to not comment, except when pushing shiny new products, it was disinclined to say anything at all once the memo was public. ATD reported initially it was a couple hundred employees, but the memo made it unclear who would be impacted and how. Yahoo later made an unusually bloodless statement that work from home was not what was right for the company at that time, given its need to turn itself around.

Mayer underscored that point in her keynote speech, with Fortune reporting that she put up an image of a purple elephant with WFH letters on its side and said, “I need to talk about the elephant in the room.”

She also tried to push blame onto, well, I am not sure whom, noting, “It was wrongly perceived as an industry narrative.” This mistakes-were-made tactic was clever, but the situation spun out of control simply due to the fact that Mayer was tin-eared on a hot-button issue and was poorly advised not to give a quick and cogent explanation of it at the time, causing a lot of unnecessary external and internal confusion and worry.

What was too bad was Mayer had a valid enough point — even if it was very harsh medicine to end the popular policy — that Yahoo probably needs all hands on deck right now to return to innovative relevance. She also said in her speech that while “people are more productive when they’re alone … they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

As I said, it’s an excellent point, even if how Mayer delivered her message turned out to be a lesson as a new CEO in how it’s not what you say, but how you say it. And, of course, when.

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

Yahoo turned in a first-quarter report that showed continued flat revenue, although earnings were up.

Here’s the liveblog of the conference call following the report, which starred Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who tried to explain how she planned to remake the Silicon Valley Internet giant to increase that weak revenue in its key display advertising and search units:

2:00 pm: I like that Mayer started on time, which many a Yahoo CEO did not in the past.

Still, there is no way she could easily explain away the revenue miss at the company in the quarter, which is due in large part to its ever-declining display advertising sales.

Thus, she used the metaphor of running to clarify the situation.

“Getting the company going at the rate we would like will take several years,” she said, describing turning Yahoo around as a “series of sprints,” including making it a great place to work.

The next sprint will be to create “beautiful products.” After that, the next one will be to improve user engagement. And then, presumably, “ultimately growth.”

2:08 pm: Mayer touted better employee collaboration, which she said has made Yahoo a more attractive place to work than ever before.

She also noted that Yahoo has gotten a lot of ex-Yahoos — which she called “boomerangs” — to return to the fold.

Mayer deftly did not mention the better earnings — largely due to cost and tax savings, as well as other financial manipulations and not sales efforts — since managing the business well is not the same as growing it.

But, let it be said: She and CFO Ken Goldman seem to be managing Yahoo very well, although Wall Street and others are expecting them to goose revenues.

2:13 pm: It is on to Goldman, who goes through the numbers, which Yahoo has already released.

Here’s a quick synopsis: Yahoo’s display advertising business is down 11 percent in the first quarter to $455 million, with the number of ads sold declining seven percent and the price per ad falling two percent.

As it did last quarter, search revenue did not save the day. It also declined 10 percent to $425 million, although it was up six percent when traffic acquisition costs were not counted in. While paid clicks were up 16 percent, price per click was down seven percent.

Employee count was down 19 percent, another expense savings.

Goldman is clearly a smart cookie, but there is a long road here from this to true revenue growth.

2:26 pm: Mayer underscored that immediately, noting that Yahoo has to meet the growth rates of competitors, such as Google and Facebook, behind which Yahoo badly lags.

“Make no mistake,” she said about that need, noting that improvements in its core properties, as well as mobile products, are key focuses for her to improve sales.

She said there was a respectable mobile growth in users in the quarter, although she declined to say just how much revenue Yahoo makes in mobile. (It’s not much yet, so that explains that.)

Partnering is also important to her, she said, working with companies all over the Internet space.

All will lead to better user engagement, and “with user engagement comes monetization,” she added.

We are on course, she concluded — presumably on what will likely be an exhausting sprint.

2:30 pm: Then, it was onto questions from analysts.

The first was about why there were declines in ad sales — via a plan to de-load pages of them or just not selling enough and declining page views.

It is a complex issue, due to various elements, from the move to mobile to waiting for product improvements to kick in with users.

There was then a question about partnering — which Yahoo has indeed been good at. That said, I sometimes wonder if the company were a bit less cooperative and more selfish, as its rivals always are, that it might be more successful.

Mayer still said she thinks partnering is a good thing.

The next question was whether Microsoft will continue to pay its revenue per search guarantees to Yahoo, as it has in the past when their search deal did not meet expectations.

From a “conservative point of view, there will be no renewal,” said Goldman, although he notes that Yahoo talks to Microsoft daily.

I’d like to hear that conversation!

2:38 pm: An obvious question then came about when the heck Yahoo will get its display business moving.

“It’s a sprint and it’s a chain reaction,” said Mayer, not precisely answering the question and using comparative metaphorical terms that were perhaps more awkward to hear today given the tragedy in Boston.

The next question was about adding more of a Google advertising relationship, a deal which would certainly up Yahoo’s revenue, although there have always been potential regulatory issues related to it.

Mayer pointed to a recent smaller ad partnership with the search giant, and “we occasionally explore new opportunities.”

What ho? (Hey, Nikesh, that’ll be me calling, so pick up!)

2:42 pm: Another question came about whether Yahoo could improve its search share, which has been declining.

Mayer, who is an expert in this area, said that search interface improvements will matter, although there are other ways of adding share too, such as closer relationships with browsers.

She was animated here, which was probably a good idea, given her COO Henrique De Castro seems to be swinging and missing in the display advertising arena.

Thus, the follow-up question was perfect, about the sales realignment that De Castro initiated that has caused a lot of internal distress at Yahoo.

Mayer said she thought that “this is the right thing to do,” although it’s not as clear if she really knows how jarring the change has been for the sales troops. Display ad sales are not her area of expertise, so she probably needs to get more up to speed on this critical issue.

2:48 pm: The usually tepid analysts kept pounding away on that issue, which Mayer answered by saying the decline is less of a decline than is had been previously. It’s faint praise, of course, but it’s a fair point.

Also of interest is whether Yahoo could create a mobile layer on top of Google’s Android as Facebook just did with its innovative Home software.

If you have been around as long as I have, you know that Yahoo once had an immersive app called Yahoo Go that came too soon and was ultimately executed badly, despite being a great concept.

Mayer did compliment Facebook on the good idea of Home, though, which was classy, since it is.

2:51 pm: There was then a question about Yahoo’s golden ticket of an asset — its large share of China’s Alibaba, which is kicking it in all aspects, especially related to revenue.

Would that Yahoo could inject some of that energy into its own core business.

Then came another important question: Does Yahoo have the assets to keep up in ad sales and technology?

“This will be an area of continued focus for us,” said Mayer.

The questions continued about mobile and pricing issues in search.

Mayer noted that although the company has no “direct monetization” from its weather and stock quote defaults on the Apple iPhone, it does provide leads to other parts of Yahoo’s offerings and is valuable for that.

As to increasing cost per clicks, she said that the gap has still not been closed with Microsoft on improving search monetization.

Which has to happen, obviously.

2:59 pm: Mayer was asked about the “next sprint,” which she said will be the fun part.

There will be version updates and more of a “cadence” that is presumably not glacial. She has certainly got to run faster, given how quickly Facebook, Google and many others are moving in comparison.

It would be fun if Yahoo could keep up the pace.

The last question was about Mayer’s strategy in search, including how to grow Web and mobile search.

Again, the search expert has a lot of good ideas.

Then, cleverly, Mayer summarized her Q1 earnings report in 140 words, via the engine it acquired from its recent $30 million purchase of Summly, versus her prepared script of 2,000 words.

I’m pleased with the continued execution I see every day — our teams have been working very hard, especially in Q1. As a result of these initiatives and many others, the talent is undeniable — today, more applicants want to work at Yahoo, and more employees are staying. These teams bring an incredible mix of engineering and technical talent, which will help us accelerate our efforts in mobile development and content personalization.

The teams are already moving quickly to amplify the entrepreneurial spirit that’s so prevalent at Yahoo right now. Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo experience is all about users’ interests and preferences. Yahoo is a consumer Internet company, and the consumer Internet is a growth industry. We’re on course to do what we said we would do — stabilize, and grow with the market.

But to summarize in even fewer words, using only my limited, non-$30 million, Twitter-schooled mental faculties: Yahoo is trying to race as fast as it can to keep up, but the results are still not in.

In an unusual hiring for a top advertising role, Yahoo has made an offer to AOL’s top sales exec Ned Brody to take over as head of its North American sales, according to sources close to the situation.

Brody has already resigned from AOL, said sources, where he headed AOL Networks — which used to be called Advertising.com. It hawks premium display, video and mobile network ads for the Web portal.

It is not clear if he has officially taken the job at Yahoo, but it seems likely given the terms, which includes a lucrative salary. More interestingly, sources said that because Brody has a 12-month, non-compete agreement with AOL that the Silicon Valley Internet giant — as part of the deal it is close to striking with him — has offered to pay him to not work in that period.

Sources close to both companies said AOL has already informed Yahoo that it might face a legal challenge to hiring Brody, because of the way it might attempt to subvert the 12-month non-compete. Because of the big Yahoo offer, AOL did not make a counter-offer to keep him.

These kinds of fights over ad sales execs have happened before. Microsoft mulled a legal challenge of Facebook’s hiring of Carolyn Everson, for example, a tense battle that was later settled.

The attractive terms offered to Brody underscore the difficulty that Yahoo has had in filling the slot, which has been open since former U.S. head Ross Levinsohn left the company a year ago. Top ad duties have been shared by Mark Ellis, VP of North American sales and global partnerships (as well as a former AOLer) and Peter Foster, who is VP of solutions development and MMD sales.

It is not clear if either has been considered for the position (or, more to the point, if they want it). The job, as described in the talent search document I had previously obtained, will report to COO Henrique De Castro and will be as SVP of its Americas unit.

As I wrote of the key job:

Since U.S. ads keep the lights on for now, a top sales exec is crucial. The Americas job was most recently held by Ross Levinsohn, who lost his bid to be CEO to Mayer. And well-regarded ad head Michael Barrett left after De Castro arrived (let’s say bygones and leave it at that).

While De Castro has talked to a number of high-profile Internet execs, none have bitten as yet, for a search that is being conducted by Spencer Stuart.

As described in the memo I obtained, which you can read below in its entirety, the job will require some big shoes to fill. “S/he will be expected to be the ‘voice’ of the Americas region, serving as bridge between the region and the corporate teams,” according to the job description. “Additionally he/she will be a thought leader within the company and a well-respected industry leader as Yahoo!’s primary externally facing advertising and media executive.”

Many have been pinged for the job by Spencer Stuart’s Jim Citrin, who has been conducting the search, including former Yahoo sales exec Rich Riley and former Google sales exec Penry Price.

It’s an important role, since U.S. ads make up a huge part of Yahoo’s revenue. And as Ad Age’s Jason Del Rey recently (and correctly) reported, the disinterest on the part of CEO Marissa Mayer to ad agencies and marketers in favor of focusing on product innovation issues (also important) has taken its toll.

“I think that [Mayer's] disengagement from the sales side is an issue, as it implies that the top of the org is only so interested in the only source of revenue,” said one top ad exec to me today.

De Castro has tried to fill the gap, although he has had less strong ties in the ad community, too. That means Yahoo might not have a year to wait for Brody, who has also served as AOL’s Chief Revenue Officer, COO of media and advertising and as EVP of paid services. He also started a commerce company called ARPU.com (now SnappCloud) and was CFO of early search company Looksmart.

On his About.me page today, Brody seems pretty happy with AOL, with a note under the title, “Living the Dream”: “Right now, I am extremely happily employed as the CEO of AOL Networks. I get to see the global turnaround of an historic property from the front line.”

(To be fair, if he subs in Yahoo for AOL, it will probably read just the same.)

I have tried to contact Brody and am awaiting comment from AOL about his status. Yahoo declined comment.