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More on Yahoo's good earnings report

Yahoo announced overnight a five-fold increase in its profits, and wants to continue its path to growth and success.

Yahoo added that the internet had reached a "tipping point" where money was following consumers from television advertising to online alternatives.

The results were boosted by the sale of part of Yahoo's stake in Google, the rival paid-search advertising company. Excluding one-off sales of assets profits rose to $187 million.

"This was also the year in which we witnessed the beginning of a tipping point in advertising in which marketers address the continued shift in consumers' changing media habits by investing more of their marketing dollars online," chief executive Terry Semel said.

Yahoo, which started life as "Jerry's guide to the World Wide Web," a single page listing internet sites that was maintained by David Filo and Jerry Yang, two graduate computer students at Stanford University, now claims to be the world's most popular website.

"Yahoo moved at an impressive pace in the fourth quarter," said Mr Semel, who has engineered a comeback from the dot-com bust during his three-year tenure.

At the end of 2004 the company had 8.4 million paying subscribers, an increase of 800,000 compared with the previous three months. For 2004, annual revenue was $3.575 billion, a 120 per cent increase on 2003.

Yesterday Yahoo's shares gained 48 cents to close at $37.18 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, then climbed another 40 cents in extended trading after thye release of the results.

A job posting on the Google web site has prompted speculation that the internet search giant is considering building its own global fiber-optic network, capable of carrying huge amounts of information.

The company is looking for candidates with experience of "dark fibre contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network".

Dark fibre refers to fibre-optic cables which have been laid but that are not yet operational. There are thousands of miles of such cables in the United States alone as potential operators have unable to make sense of the cost of making them operational.

The job advert has been interpreted as a hint towards the massive amount of bandwidth capacity Google is planning to use in future years. Bandwidth is the all-important measure of how much digital information a cable or other conduit can carry.

It could also suggest that Google is looking at the possibility of launching a telecommunications business.

Source: Business Times Online

Posted by seomasters at January 19, 2005 12:08 PM | TrackBack