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"Savior. Visionary. A new hope.\nThese were just some of the glowing words used by the press to describe Marissa Mayer when she was hired as Yahoo's CEO one year ago. That sense of optimism appeared inside the company as well, with one employee going so far as to hang up a poster of Mayer's face above the word \"hope,\" based on the iconic Shepard Fairey illustration of Barack Obama.\n\n\n\nHOPE: Yahoo style (hanging in Sunnyvale, employee created) pic.twitter.com/ycdo05ca\u2014 Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) July 20, 2012\n\n\n\nTo understand the enthusiasm around Mayer, just remember that Yahoo had four different CEOs in the year prior to her hiring, two of which ended very poorly. Carol Bartz was fired in September 2011 after investors became disillusioned with her inability to find new sources of revenue and boost the stock price. Scott Thompson, who took over the role in January, was pressured to step down from the company just a few months later amid claims of lying about his computer science degree. \nSEE ALSO: Yahoo's First 10 Acquisitions Under Marissa Mayer\nMayer, who was the 20th employee at Google, was viewed as a fresh start for the company, given her experience overseeing product development and recruiting engineering talent. She also was seen as possessing the kind of star power that could revitalize interest in the stale Yahoo brand. One year later, Mayer has successfully boosted morale among employees, trimmed some of the fat from the company and kept Yahoo front and center in the news cycle through a series of product updates, high-profile acquisitions and, yes, her own star power. \nHowever, Yahoo's core problem \u2014 the one that plagued Mayer's predecessors \u2014 remains very much unsolved: Its display ad business is on the decline. \nYahoo dominated the display ad market last decade, but Google and Facebook have since passed it, thanks in part to the number of ads Google serves through YouTube and Facebook's successful shift to mobile. Yahoo's share of the U.S. display ad market is projected to decline to just 7.8% this year, according to data provided to Mashable from eMarketer, down from about 18.4% in 2008.\nThe decline in display ad revenue is dragging down Yahoo's overall revenue. Yahoo's revenue dropped to $1.1 billion in the March quarter from $1.22 billion the same quarter a year earlier \u2014 even though search revenue actually increased by 6% \u2014 because display ad revenue dropped by 11%.\n\"The vast majority of Yahoo's revenue comes from advertising and they operate in a particularly challenged sub sector of online advertisers,\" Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, told Mashable in an interview. \"There's nothing that they've done [this past year] that changes that.\"\n Yahoo's share of total U.S. display ad revenue is on the decline. Source: eMarketer\nA Work in Progress\nMayer has repeatedly described her strategy to turn Yahoo around as a series of sprints. Yahoo first needs to attract and hold onto \"great people,\" who then work to build \"great products,\" which ultimately boost user engagement and help the company increase its ad revenue. \nMuch of Mayer's focus in her first year was on the first of those sprints. She instituted hundreds of \"employee-focused initiatives\" and perks to bring Yahoo's work culture more in line with competing tech companies. She also used Yahoo's cash pile to purchase 16 startups, most of which were primarily to bring more mobile engineering talent into the company. Aside from leading to a great deal of press coverage, these efforts have helped Yahoo attract more job applications and improve morale among employees. One survey from Glassdoor, a job site featuring anonymous employee reviews for thousands of companies, found that employee satisfaction at Yahoo has hit a five-year high under Mayer's leadership.\nIn recent months, Mayer has pushed forward on the second sprint by introducing major updates to several Yahoo products, including a complete redesign of Flickr, a redesigned Yahoo homepage and a new Yahoo weather app, which won a design award last month from Apple. At the same time, Yahoo has killed off more than a dozen less frequently used products, including AltaVista and Axis. \nSo far, though, these efforts to focus and improve Yahoo's product lineup haven't had much \u2014 if any \u2014 positive impact on Wall Street and Main Street's perceptions of the company. In fact, according to YouGov's BrandIndex, which tracks daily changes in consumer perception of brands, Yahoo is viewed less positively now than it was a year ago. \n\nTed Marzilli, SVP and managing director of BrandIndex, told Mashable that respondents rate Yahoo \"in the context of other brands that do similar things,\" meaning that Yahoo's declining numbers could simply be a result of other competitors performing better. Alternatively, he suggested it could be a sign that consumers are put off by all the changes. \"It could also be that I go to Yahoo now and it changed my email format or the homepage,\" he said.\nAt first blush, Yahoo's stock performance over the past year suggests that Wall Street is a big fan of Mayer. The stock price has increased more than 70% since she took over as CEO, a remarkable run that has added nearly $14 billion to the company's market cap. But that increase has had less to do with Yahoo's acquisition spree or Mayer's sprint-strategy than its 23% stake in Alibaba, a huge Chinese ecommerce company that is expected to go public in the near future. \n\"Much of what Yahoo the company has done doesn't really matter in the context of Yahoo the stock. Almost all the value that's been generated is because of expectations around Alibaba,\" Wieser said. When asked to name Mayer's biggest accomplishment, he said, \"Nothing. Nothing material.\"\nOther analysts are a little more generous in their appraisal of Mayer's efforts. \n\"They've certainly begun to place their bets under their new leadership,\" Clark Fredricksen, VP at eMarketer, told Mashable. \"We expect that that will lead to some results both in display and search advertising.\"\n\nYHOO data by YCharts\nWhat to Expect in Mayer's Second Year at Yahoo\nDuring the fourth quarter earnings call in January, Mayer described Yahoo's turnaround efforts as a \"multi-year march towards growth.\" With that in mind, we may not see the full impact of Yahoo's investments play out even in her second year, but Fredricksen does expect to see some signs of improvement in Yahoo's ad business. \n\"The company appears to be slowing down the trend of declining traffic,\" he said. \"As they invest more across multiple sectors of the business, as they focus resources and cut some of the fat that they've had ... you'd expect that they would probably start to see impressions, usage and thus ad inventory stop declining and start to level off rather than fall.\" \nIn particular, he expects Yahoo to \"become much more aggressive\" in mobile advertising in an effort to catch up to Facebook and Google.\n\"Those companies have very, very strong not only mobile user bases, but also mobile ad products that have been able to monetize effectively. Yahoo has not,\" Fredricksen said. The acquisitions Mayer made in year one suggest that changing this will be a big focus area in year two. \"That's an area that the company appears to be investing in significantly.\"\nThere is some cause for optimism about Yahoo's prospects on this front. Data provided to Mashable by comScore shows that Yahoo's audience on smartphones has grown at a faster rate than Google and nearly as fast as Facebook, though it's still behind both companies in overall users.  \n\n\"It's tough to turn the ship around immediately when your ship is such a massive player in the ad market,\" Fredricksen said. \"These things take time.\"\nHow would you rate Marissa Mayer's performance in her first year as Yahoo CEO? Share your thoughts in the comments. \nImage via Emmanuel Dunand/Getty Images\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/07/15/marissa-mayer-yahoo-first-year/>