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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

This is a genuine question: where is Yahoo getting all this money from?

I think the average internet-goer (myself included) would probably be surprised to hear they're profitable enough to have made so many large purchases recently...

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Yahoo owns about 24% of Alibaba, a company that's worth ~$150B (varies widely on who you talk to). They are reducing their position by 5-10%, which translates into anywhere from $5B to $20B in cash.

Now thats a smart move, reduce your stake in one of the strongest growth stories ever to buy a struggling analytics company.

The reduction in stake was a long-term agreement between the two. Yahoo has no choice but to sell. Keeping in mind the hotness of $BABA, they've re-negotiated the deal and now have permission to sell only ~140M shares at IPO, instead of the earlier agreed-upon ~230M.

I think you're ignoring brand synergy.

Flurry is a perfect fit brand-wise.

What's the point of having a 3rd rate photo sharing service if you don't have 3rd rate analytics to go with it, and who wants growth when the rest of the company is dying?

It's got more traffic than everyone except Google (and YouTube.com) and Facebook [1]. And they have a top 5 site for 8 of the 17 categories [2].

[fd -- yahoo employee]

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[1]: http://www.alexa.com/topsites

[2]: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category

That's really interesting. Not doubting the numbers necessarily, but does Alexa still get its numbers from browser toolbars, making it somewhat biased?

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/alexa-overhauls-ranking-sys...

Google Display Network Ad Planner rates Yahoo 3rd [1] (but does not count itself but does include YouTube so ...)

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[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

They make $1B+ a quarter, have 2B in the bank and the stake in Alibaba should result in a large cash influx.

they are always well above water. valley does not like them because they dont grow as fast as other smaller companies and they are boring. ie they are more like GE than a startup.

They me be above water, but mostly due to their stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an entirely separate company). Whatever Yahoo actually does isn't making a lot of money, and appears to have negative value in the market.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-17/is-yahoo-s-...

Yahoo had a gross profit of $3.3B in the last year, and has $2.74B in the bank. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO+Key+Statistics

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