yang

Updated 3:20 p.m. PDT with further details from conference call.

Yahoo on Tuesday reported a 64 percent drop in net income for the third quarter, issued cautions about a weakening advertising market, and confirmed that layoffs are indeed on the way.

"As we saw the online ad market decline in the third quarter, I decided Yahoo needed to accelerate the process of getting more competitive," Chief Executive Jerry Yang said in a conference call. "We anticipate we will reduce headcount by at least 10 percent" by the end of the year.

With 14,300 … Read more

No doubt, it's been a doozy of a year for Jerry Yang & co.

Yahoo could have been sold for $33 per share to Microsoft back in the spring; now it's trading at less than $12. Internet advertising may be in for a rough patch, along with the rest of the economy. And morale at the Internet pioneer, well, just isn't what it used to be.

With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to create a handy list for Yahoo watchers to keep in mind as Yahoo struggles to right its ship in the … Read more

NEW YORK--When Yahoo finally debuted its display-ad platform in a press conference here on Wednesday, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker had an unusual guest on hand: actor Jon Hamm, who plays 1960s-era advertising exec Don Draper on the critically acclaimed drama Mad Men.

"I do feel a little strange being up in front of a group of people, in front of cameras, talking about advertising, instead of smoking nine cigarettes and drinking three or four glasses of Scotch," Hamm said, referring to Draper's hard-living attitude, "although maybe if this was a little later in … Read more

In January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang offered a sneak peek at Yahoo's next-generation, socially networked user experience. In a Flash-based demo, Yang showed how Yahoo was opening up its platform to third-party developers and building hooks to socialize the experience for the more than 500 million users of its various services.

But that demo of socially enriched Yahoo services is still incubating, and the company has not been successful in becoming a social-networking hub. Yahoo 360, introduced in 2005 , never took off. A more hip version, Mash, was recently shuttered … Read more

On Tuesday's edition of Daily Debrief, our Microsoft-Yahoo watcher Dawn Kawamoto talks with me about what has happened since Yahoo's well-documented August 1 shareholder meeting. Yahoo's stock price is nearing a 52-week low this week, but the herd of press and analysts covering the company are either on summer vacation or allowing Jerry Yang and his somewhat new board of directors a respite from their attention. Like other public companies, Yahoo lives by the financial quarter, so the watchers will be hovering as the quarter ends in September, speculating on how Yang and company perform now that … Read more

Updated August 21, 2008 at 11:02 AM PST with comments from Glassdoor's CEO.

Glassdoor.com uses an online questionnaire so employees can rate their companies and CEOs. I took the questionnaire. It's all the usual stuff, like what do you think of the leadership abilities and competence of senior management, would you recommend your company as a place to work, that sort of thing.

I thought it would be interesting to track the stock performance of the

public companies with CEOs that had the highest approval ratings versus those with the lowest approval ratings.

Guess what I found?

Over the past five years, shares of all the companies whose CEOs had the highest approval ratings were in the black, while shares of all the companies whose CEOs had the lowest approval ratings were either in the red or flat. We're talking 8 of 8 in the black, 8 of 8 in the red or flat.

What does that tell you?

First, that we live in America, the great land of greed and capitalism. If you're stock is in the money, the CEO's a god. If your options are under water, he's a dog. And don't flame me, it's what employees had to say, not me. But for what it's worth, I don't think that's a bad thing.… Read more

Now the fireworks and fractiousness can officially move inside Yahoo: activist investor Carl Icahn is part of the Internet company's board.

Icahn had tried to take over the entire board in July, but settled for a seat of his own and for two of his allies. In a regulatory filing Wednesday, Yahoo said Icahn is officially on the board, replacing Robert Kotick as planned.

One of Icahn's first roles on the board will be to help pick the two allies who will join him. The new appointments are set to be announced by August 15, increasing Yahoo's … Read more

The shareholder approval ratings for Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock plunged Tuesday after Yahoo released new results that corrected a vote transmission error.

Shareholders unhappy with board members withheld their votes in the Friday election. In Yahoo's official voting tally released Friday, 14.6 percent of votes for Yang and 20.5 percent for Bostock were withheld.

But in the corrected results, Yang's withhold percentage rose to 33.7 percent and Bostock's to 39.6 percent, Yahoo said.

Update 2:09 p.m. PDT: Quantitatively, the change means nothing: "These errors did not … Read more

Yahoo said it plans to update a shareholder vote results after an error in transmission meant some dissatisfaction with Yahoo management wasn't reflected in Friday's board member election figures.

Capital Research Global Investors, suspecting an error in the Yahoo vote tally, said on Monday that it requested that the firm it uses to transmit the votes to Yahoo check its work to see if there was an error. On Tuesday, that firm, Broadridge Financial Solutions, said it found a "truncation error" that underreported how many votes were withheld for some board members.

Withholding votes in a … Read more