One-to-one marketing: Yahoo profits soar while share prices drop due to doubts

SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo's second-quarter results showed a profit of US$112.5 million, and revenues of $832 million, over twice as much as for the same period last year.

Despite this, Yahoo's share price dropped, with investors expecting better revenue performance.

Search and brand advertising accounted for the bulk of the rise, with the acquisition of Overture Services playing a key role. In total, revenue from marketing services hit $215 million, a 215 per cent increase, year-on-year.

Search queries dropped marginally during the quarter, suggesting that the paid search market may be experiencing a slowdown after huge growth over the past two years. The portal recently unveiled Yisou, its Chinese-language search engine for the mainland. With both search and brand advertising seeing rapid growth in China, the company is experiencing strong competition from both Google and local search engines in the country.