well, GeoCities sure brought them a ton of users, and even if they were expensive compared to how Google or Facebook got their users, it was different back then, and buying a successful company may have been less expensive (and successful, at least) in the end than doing a lot of pointless tv commercials.

BTW, getting rid of Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Shopping, Zimbra (given how poor the current Yahoo! Mail is) and del.icio.us does not seem very wise to me...