Yahoo sees rosy future without microsoft

The short version is a press release. The long version is an investor's presentation - 35 pages in .pdf formatting - that Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both versions present a much rosier future for the struggling search engine than most analysts would have you believe.

Can you imagine a Yahoo that two-base hit its cash flow and addition its gross by more than 50 percentage in just three years? Without Microsoft purchasing it out? Seemingly Yang can. I have surely been wrong earlier but, not to put too fine a point on it, I'd like some of whatever Jerry's having.

How precisely does Yahoo propose to accomplish this? That extra money is not going to come from hunt advertising, where Google leads the marketplace. Yahoo undertaking that it will come from show advertising, including banners and videos. While this area has traditionally been one of Yahoo's strengths, it has recently proved vulnerable to other web publishers, most notably social networking sites such as MySpace. Yahoo's plan calls for growth faster than the marketplace in an attempt to take back lost share. That could work - if it doesn't lose any more hunt advertising to Google.

But to achieve this goal, Yahoo needs to pull some very ambitious numbers. It expects to sell $8.8 one million million in online advertising in 2010, an addition of $5.1 one million million over 2008. Yahoo thinks it will pull this off by increasing its ad sales by 11 percent in 2008 - and 25 percent in both 2009 and 2010. It is almost as if Yahoo is saying "What recession? What's all this talk about a bubble bursting? That doesn't apply to us!"