Ad confidence spurs Yahoo!

Oversees biz triples

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 19th January 2005 10:04 GMT

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Yahoo! posted its best ever numbers again today. Quarterly revenue topped a billion dollars for the first time, and after traffic costs were excluded, Yahoo! grossed $785m in income. Net income doubled over the preceding period last year to $373m, or $187m after an investment sale is removed from the numbers, more than double the $75m recorded in the same period last year.

Over the year, Yahoo! made $840m profit on sales of $3.575bn. The company does not break down income into banner ads on its own site and the income from classified ads via Overture.

Oversees ad revenue saw the fastest growth, with income outside the US up from $118.4m a year ago to $302.6 in Q4 FY2004, despite the defection of AOL Europe to arch ad rival Google. US revenues grew from $545m to $775m.

The books value the company at $9bn, and it has $4bn in assets, of which $1.4bn is cash.

Both Google and Yahoo! have seen explosive growth from their ad brokerage businesses, although Google recently said that it expects the growth of classified ad revenue to slow. Google's CFO, George Reyes, told a conference recently that the sector remained under a cloud unless solutions are found to combat click fraud.

"I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," he said. ®