Quiz Time: Which was the No.1 most visited website in the U.S. last month?
All joking aside, the answer may surprise you.
The Meyer Effect
In June, 196.6 million unique users visited Yahoo (YHOO) website, 4.3 million more than Google (GOOG), 5.4 million more than Facebook.com (FB) and 8.2 million more than AOL (AOL). This is the first time in years that Yahoo has led the list.
These results don’t even include traffic from Tumblr.com, social media platform that hosts over 100 million blogs in a dozen languages. Tumblr—which was recently bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion—ranked at No. 28 on the list on its own.
And just a quick glance at my Portfolio Grader rankings tool shows that YHOO tops the others in more ways than one:
Now, despite being No. 1, there is plenty of room left for Yahoo to grow—these results don’t include mobile traffic. But if things continue as they have under CEO Marissa Mayer, it shouldn’t take long for Yahoo to catch up to Google in the mobile arena. Ever since the former Google exec took the helm as CEO, Yahoo has undergone radical changes in the interest of being nimble.
In fact, the Tumblr deal marks the seventh buyout since Mayer joined Yahoo last summer. The company has been snapping up app developers left and right, including the creators of news aggregator Summly, mobile personalization app Alike, mobile recommendations startup Stamped, and social news service Snip.it. Through this buying spree, Yahoo has amassed a team of engineers with expertise in mobile applications and social networking.
Marissa Mayer has accomplished a lot in her first year at Yahoo (as shown by the company’s recent earnings announcement), and I’m confident that the company will progress under her leadership. And the analyst community clearly agrees—Yahoo is expected to post double-digit earnings growth through the end of next year. I also like the $5 billion stock buyback program. I consider YHOO a great buy.
