Yahoo! reported earnings yesterday and oh, what a quarter it was. In fact, quarterly profits nearly quintupled. How many times a month can one actually use the word "quintupled?"
The Internet
bellwether reported net income that rose to $373 million, or 25 cents a share, helped along by its sale of shares in Google. Excluding the gain from the share sale, fourth-quarter net profit rose to
$187 million, or 13 cents a share, from $75 million, or 5 cents, last year. Revenue, excluding fees Yahoo! pays to advertising partners, rose to $785 million from $511 million a year earlier.
Revenue derived from marketing services, including branded and Web search advertising, increased by 67 percent to $911 million. Fees revenue, which includes high-speed Internet services provided with
SBC Communications, rose 52 percent to $129 million. Listings revenue from businesses including HotJobs rose 15 percent to $38 million.
Yahoo! also reported 8.4 million paying subscribers, up
about 800,000 from the third quarter. The company projected that revenue, excluding fees it pays to advertisers, will range from $765 million to $805 million in the current first quarter. For the
full year, it said revenues would be $3.37 billion to $3.57 billion.
It looks as though marketers are pushing more of their money from TV to the Web. In fact, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel said
yesterday that he believes that 2004 was the year "in which we witnessed the beginning of a tipping point in advertising" whereby marketers followed consumers right onto the Web. If that is the case,
2005 may be the year that analysts' forecasts of some 25 percent growth in online advertising come to fruition.
For Yahoo!, the news is great. The only thing better, perhaps, is its imminent
Broadway debut. What? Yes, Yahoo! hits the Great White Way in March. Stay tuned.