Yahoo! broke down the results for its three separate revenue lines: Marketing services; fees; and listings. Marketing services (which encompass online advertising and the paid search deal with Overture, jumped 38 percent to $190m. Executives said that the revenue line was boosted by growth in revenue from Overture business and from business from traditional advertisers. Semel said during a conference call that excluding payments from Overture, marketing services revenue increased by a "double-digit percentage" over last year. The Web company's fees and revenue rose 61 percent to $63.7m. The numbers include Yahoo!'s co-branded digital subscriber line (DSL) business with SBC Communications, online personals and email storage. Paid subscribers increased to 2.9m from 2.2m in the last quarter, according to Yahoo! About 245,000 to 280,000 of the net subscriber gains came from SBC DSL subscribers switching to the SBC Yahoo! co-branded service, Susan Decker, Yahoo!'s chief financial officer, said during the conference call. (The Web company gets a cut of the monthly bill of users who have migrated over.) However, Decker added that the number of migrations should tail off by the end of next quarter. One sore spot in the fees business was Yahoo!'s enterprise services business, which reported a loss of $6m to $7m in revenue due to the de-emphasis of its event-based Webcasting service and the sale of other businesses. Yahoo!'s listing revenue, which encompasses online job-listing subsidiary HotJobs, accounted for $29.3m in revenue -- an 89 percent increase from last year. All signs indicate that Yahoo! will continue its upward growth as it sheds itself from the bloodletting during 2001. Whether or not today's earnings signal an overall comeback for online advertising remains to be seen, as Yahoo! has been forced to rethink its approach to advertisers much earlier than many others in the market. "I think the story now is how (online advertising revenue) grows for its core marketing services," said Jeffrey Fieler, an analyst at Bear Stearns.
See the Finance News Section for the latest financial news in the high-tech sector.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
