Comments on: What A Week To Be Off…

By: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:41:04 +0000

Following up on Yahoo: I followed Henrik's lead to the slides for the conference call and compared to the equivalent numbers for Q2 2001.

During these four years, the annualized grwoth rates for Yahoo's numbers were as follows:

Revenues: 48% per year
CPM: 15% per year
Pageviews: 28% per year

Even though revenues = CPM * pageviews, you can't add up the 15% and 28% to get 48%, because we are talking about annualized growth rates (i.e., exponential formulas, not linear).

Conclusion: even though it's important to increase the extent to which each pageview is monetized, it was about twice as important for Yahoo to simply increase the use of their services.

By: Doug Mehus

Doug Mehus — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 21:09:08 +0000

You missed commenting on News Corp.’s acquisition of Intermix Media, Inc., majority-owner (and soon to be sole owner) of MySpace.com, John. Would be interesting to hear ytour thoughts on this just as I have commented here.

Glad you’re happy to be back.

Ciao,
Doug

By: Henrik Torstensson

Henrik Torstensson — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:12:25 +0000

I did the revenue per page view calculation too as a CPM of 280 seemed way high.

In the slides for the conference call (p 10) Yahoo said that they ended Q2 with 3.2 billion page views per day. That means approx. 280 billion page views for the quarter and revenue per page view of $0.003.

By: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 19:36:25 +0000

Revenue per pageview is an interesting metric, but what does "revenue per average daily page" mean (in the analysis of Yahoo's earnings)?

If I make one cent per pageview, is that 91 cents per "average daily page" across a quarter?

If so, then the stated 28 cents equates to only 0.3 cents per pageview, or a CPM of $3.

In 2001, I computed that Yahoo made 0.2 cents per pageview, so if they make 0.3 cents now, that's a nice 50% increase over a period of about four years. (But during 1998-2000, they made 0.4 cents per pageview, so they are not back to the high point yet.)

Of course, the number of pageviews must be up dramatically since the old days.

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 18:01:01 +0000

It seems more like an answer to Google Maps than to Google Earth. Lots of Microsoft PR seems to indicate otherwise, and I’ve actually seen reviews that say “Unlike Google Earth, you won’t need a client!”, but so far Virtual Earth is inline with what Google Maps does, and is a fair ways off from Google Earth.