Marissa Mayer Hits Her 1 Year Anniversary at Yahoo

IMG: Brigitte Lacombe via Glamour

Yahoo Inc.’s share prices have risen tremendously, more than 70% since Marissa Mayer became the Chief Executive. Since coming aboard, Yahoo has purchased 17 technology startups, most notably Tumblr and Summly, an app created by 17-year old Nick D’Aloisio. Yahoo paid $1.1 million for Tumblr alone.

Recreating Yahoo will be a slow process. Only about 4.9% of searches come from Yahoo. Many of the companies that they did buy were struggling and only had a few employees left.

Marissa Mayer is Yahoo’s sixth CEO in the past five years, including two interim CEOs. Google and Facebook generate much more revenue than Yahoo from ads, so there has been discussion on the Yahoo board about whether the company should remain an independent, publicly traded entity. While small, the revenue rose by 2% last year.

“It’s no longer shameful to work at Yahoo,” an employee said recently.

A Yahoo spokeswoman stated that “more people are applying to work at Yahoo and more employees are staying.”

Mayer’s goal in her process of turning the company around is making Yahoo something used on everyone’s mobile devices. She has also focused on redesigning the companies’ apps. 16% of iPhone users used a Yahoo app in June. After purchasing Tumblr, these figures rose to 22%. While this is progress, Facebook, Google and Twitter apps are used by 80%, 69% and 31% of iPhone users in June.

“Our biggest problem is impressions,” or usage of Yahoo’s websites, Ms. Mayer said in February. “The way to grow revenue is to grow usage or prices. We’re successfully growing prices…we need to grow usage.”

To view Marissa Mayer’s entire profile, click here.

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