Tsavo Media, which operates a network of roughly 300 websites and blogs as an indirect subsidiary of Canadian online publishing and advertising company Cyberplex, is being retroactively charged $4.8 million “over a reasonable time period” by Yahoo for sending the latter company’s advertisers “low quality traffic” in 2011.

To boot, Cyberplex president Ted Hastings (formerly Tsavo Media’s CEO), apparently jumped ship.

It’s a curious story, to say the least.

Tsavo Media, once led by former MySpace CEO and previously AOL SVP Mike Jones, was acquired by Cyberplex back in May 2010, for a reported $75 million.

The company’s network of Internet publications includes crappy websites like LumaGardening.com, ThinkFashion, TechSerious, WealthyGeek, Twirlit, DiscoverFame and KidGlue.

Now, according to a press statement released earlier today, a Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Cyberplex has been appointed to “review the status of Tsavo Media and strategic alternatives available to create shareholder value out of that division, which is currently heavily encumbered by debt under Tsavo Media’s credit facility with American Capital”.

I bet this wasn’t what they had in mind when they acquired Tsavo Media. But then again, what good could have come out of buying a crappy content generation machine anyway?

Cyberplex had this to say about the sticky Yahoo situation it now finds itself in:

The Company reported today that Tsavo Media has been engaged in discussions with Yahoo! to address concerns regarding the quality of traffic provided to the Yahoo! advertising base, and Tsavo Media’s reliance on Yahoo!’s traffic quality reporting system. Tsavo Media has now been informed that it will be required to pay to Yahoo! approximately $4.8 million over a reasonable time period currently being discussed, notwithstanding prior information that indicated good quality traffic at that time.

This amount may be partially offset by achieving certain performance incentives and anticipated improvements in average revenues per click, but the Company noted that there can be no assurance as to how much, if any, of this payment to Yahoo! would be offset through these incentives and improvements.

Translation: unless a miracle happens, we’re going to have to cough up some serious dough, and we can only hope we don’t have to pay everything all at once and in the near future.

The Company noted that Yahoo! provides bi-weekly quality reports to Tsavo Media, which are extremely important to Tsavo Media in the management of its systems, analysis, forecasting and ultimately its day-to-day business decisions. Yahoo! recently communicated to Tsavo Media that notwithstanding the good quality score reports that had been provided throughout most of 2011, Yahoo! would retroactively charge Tsavo for what Yahoo! is now saying was actually low quality traffic, ranging back over many months during 2011.

While the Company and Yahoo! remain in discussions on this issue, the Company now expects that Yahoo! will enforce its decision to charge back this amount citing its right to do so pursuant to the terms of Tsavo Media’s agreement with Yahoo!

Translation: first Yahoo says we did a good job last year, but now they say we did a bad job, and according to the deal we agreed upon they can actually retroactively charge us for it.

“We are very frustrated by the timing of these events after spending almost one year rebuilding the Tsavo organization while negotiating a settlement with American Capital”, said Geoffrey Rotstein, CEO of Cyberplex.

“These events are disappointing given all of the hard work the Tsavo employees have invested to rebuild the organization and because they continue to take away and distract from all of the other positive developments and momentum being created within both Tsavo and the other divisions of Cyberplex.”

Translation: Oh FFF******CCCKKK.

Yahoo is moving forward with a “mobile first” mindset, the company stated via blog post late last week, then incongruously announced it would be shuttering 10 of its mobile applications. The list, which contains a mix of iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps, includes an odd, and somewhat surprising group of underperforming properties. Yahoo Deals, News, Shopping, Finance and Movies, were included among the shutdowns, for example.

Yahoo isn’t cutting all of its News and Finance apps, however – only those on platforms it hasn’t found to be worth the effort to support, it appears. Also, Yahoo’s bread-and-butter apps like Mail and Messenger are safe, as well as newer apps like its TV companion IntoNow and its iPad mag Livestand.

As for Sketch-a-Search and AppSpot, the apps’ technologies won’t be abandoned, but will rather be incorporated into Yahoo’s main search app.

The full list of apps being shut down includes:

• Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
• Yahoo! Answers (Android)
• Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
• Yahoo! Movies (Android)
• Yahoo! News (Android)
• Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

I’ll be honest – I don’t remember hearing of Meme or Mim, so those won’t be missed, I’ll wager. However, it’s a little surprising to see Finance dumped from BlackBerry – after all, who still rocks a ‘berry, but those busy banker/corporate types who constantly check headlines and stock quotes? And neither Yahoo Shopping nor Deals apps could survive on the phones preferred by those with disposable incomes (that is, the iPhone)? Crazy.

Given the news, it was kind of funny to read Yahoo’s declaration of its “mobile first” ambitions, but what the company means is that it’s going to spend time on its more innovative and popular apps, and less on these general purpose (read: boring) creations.

Everyone’s favorite puppet cowboy, Tom Hanks, is working with Playtone and Reliance Entertainment on a new web series called Electric City (logo not shown). According to the AP, the show is about a “seemingly peaceful city situated in a post-apocalyptic world” and each episode will be three or four minutes long.

The shows will have a socially conscious message including conservation and energy issues. This is Yahoo’s first scripted program and it will be available through multiple devices in multiple languages. Hanks will appear as a character.

Quoth the AP:

It’s interesting to watch Yahoo move into a different medium here and here’s hoping Hanks and his animations will make it a better year for the beleaguered company.

As you may have heard, Yahoo finally has a new CEO: PayPal president Scott Thompson will be serving that particular, unambiguously difficult role.

We hopped on the conference call Yahoo orchestrated for the occasion, and picked up on some interesting things said by Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock on the future of the company.

Bostock said, in no uncertain terms, that Yahoo is currently, and will likely stay a public company. In other words: so much for the full buyout scenario.

According to our notes, Bostock said:

“I do not envision not being a public company going forward.

I think we’d have one hell of a challenge [to take it private]. We are a public company, we expect to run it as a public company going forward. It is kind of a moot issue going forward.”

Bostock also – somewhat – addressed Yahoo’s oh-so-important Asian assets, claiming that the appointment of Thompson as chief executive in these tumultuous times for the company will not be causing any slowdowns or delays in any of the processes currently underway:

“In looking at the alternatives in the review, whatever alternatives we are looking at, there will be no slowdown or delay in that process. Scott will climb onboard, has caught up to those processes. There will be no delay as we move forward.

[This] will not be a distraction for Scott. He will jump on the running boards of the car as it is moving along.”

And we’ll be standing by the side of the road to see what happens to it next.

Last Friday, troubled Internet giant Yahoo filed a new trademark application with the USPTO. I can’t find any record of an existing Yahoo product or service by the name, so I figured I should just throw it out here for all of you to speculate what the company has up its sleeves.

The name, before I forget to mention it, is Yahoo Axis. That will make you none the wiser, but perhaps the classes and descriptions might:

International Class 038: Telecommunications services; namely, providing access to computer database via the internet; transmission of information over the internet or other communications networks; telecommunication services, namely, the transmission of data and information

International Class 042: Computer services, namely, creating indexes of information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks; searching and retrieving information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks for others; providing an online link to news, weather, sports, current events, and reference material

Your guess is as good as mine, and the comment floor is yours. What is Yahoo Axis?

Later this month Yahoo plans to release new features for its iPad based app, Livestand, which was launched in November and Yahoo describes as a “digital newsstand” where users can “create a personalized magazine based on topics” they find interesting.

Debra Weissman, VP Product Management with Livestand, Yahoo offered us a brief early look at what consumers can expect to see. Offerings include a “recipe finder” app that allows people to create a list of ingredients to share with others, a “local deals” service for browsing discounts based on geographic location and an “improved guest mode” feature those not signed in as users.

VC Marc Andreessen has taken to his personal blog to quell the rumors that he’s in the running for the position of chairman of the board at Yahoo. The rumors have been widely reported by a number of news outlets based on unknown sources. Serious speculation has ensued, even leading people to wonder what the VC’s first move at Yahoo as chairman of the board will be. (Hint: find a CEO, it’s been suggested).

Well, put those rumors to rest, says Andreeseen. It’s not happening.

The blog post is short and to the point. It reads:

Over the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity.

To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any operating role at Yahoo, including CEO, acting CEO, chairman, or executive chairman.

Jeff and I have high regard for Yahoo, but we are fully committed to our day jobs as general partners at Andreessen Horowitz and board members of our portfolio companies.

Note the language, though – Andreessen is saying that he won’t take “any operating role” at Yahoo, not that he won’t be involved.

The future for Internet services pioneer Yahoo remains uncertain, to put it mildly.

Currently a beleaguered takeover target sans visionary CEO (although one could argue recently fired Carl Bartz never served that role either), Asian e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group is apparently going to great lengths to re-acquire the stake Yahoo has in the company.

According to Reuters, Alibaba is seeking up to $4 billion in debt financing to bankroll buying back Yahoo’s 40 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce behemoth.

Sources tell Reuters that financial advisory group Rothschild has delivered term sheets to banks, requesting underwritten proposals for the debt financing with a term of up to three years. One source said the term sheet involves commitments of $1 billion with an expected final hold of $400 million.

Alibaba is also one of the partners of a consortium that is plotting to swallow Yahoo whole, and founder Jack Ma recently said at an industry event that he would indeed be “very interested” in acquiring the global Internet giant.

According to a recent report from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Alibaba has engaged in talks with Softbank, Blackstone Group and Bain Capital about making a bid for Yahoo.

Other bidders include a group formed by Silver Lake, Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz in addition to a partnership between TPG and Greylock Partners. To be continued, no doubt.

Related: Alibaba.com Grows Revenues And Profits, Misses Expectations

Yahoo has just announced that it has been awarded a $610 million default judgment against spammers responsible for a fake Yahoo lottery email scheme. The order was handed down by a federal district court judge in New York on Monday, December 5, 2011.

Apparently in the scheme, email messages were sent to users trying to deceive them into believing they had won a lottery prize offered by Yahoo. The hoax was designed to get users to send spammers personal data such as social security numbers and credit card numbers, which are then used for identity and credit theft. Yahoo originally filed the lawsuit in 2008.

According to the statement, the judge found the defaulting defendants jointly and severally liable as participants in a conspiracy under New York common law. The $610 million judgment was composed of a statutory damages award for trademark infringement in the amount of $27 million and a statutory damages award for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the amount of $583 million. Yahoo was also awarded attorneys’ fees.

Earlier this year, Facebook was also awarded a hefty, $360 million judgement against spammers. Another Facebook spammers faces a $1 billion fine.

The problem with these huge awards and the nature of the spamming business is accountability. Now the challenge will be actually recovering the hundreds of millions in judgement money from the spammers.

Yahoo’s famous, long-standing billboard on the San Francisco skyline is coming down. In two weeks, the space will be available for some other company, according to a report in the San Francisco Egotist. The billboard outlasted 4 Yahoo CEO’s. It was put up under Tim Koogle in 1999, and survived through Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, and now Interim CEO Tim Morse.

The retro billboard was put up in a dot-com era before Facebook and Twitter. There’s some speculation now on whether a new dot-com might take over the space.

The agency that created the iconic billboard, Black Rocket, wanted to create something very different from all the other dot-com-boom startups that were putting billboards up on 101 in Silicon Valley. The Yahoo billboard is on Interstate 80, on the approach to the Bay Bridge.

The billboard, which featured the tagline, “A nice place to stay on the Internet”, had room for two lines of ever-changing text. Sometimes those lines would promote a Yahoo product, but it also featured favorites like “You look cute today.” It also had a hotel-like “No Vacancy” light. But, the “No” was not lit up, implying Yahoo had room for some more guests.

A sister billboard in LA was used on the cover of this Yahoo’s 2002 Annual Report:
There were other sister ones put up in Soho and Times Square in New York.

One of the ads creator’s told the Egotist, “San Francisco is losing what has turned into an icon.” On Facebook and Twitter, many Yahoo employees, former Yahoo’s and Yahoo visitors are calling it a sad day.

For more on the backstory of how the sign came to life, read the Egotist article.

Update: A “Save the Yahoo! Billboard” Facebook page has been created with 66 likes so far. If anyone thinks this page might really save it, there’s a billboard bridge in Brooklyn I have to sell you.

Photo: Flickr/peanutian

There have been a number of rumors circulating around Yahoo, Microsoft, and Aol of late, most of them focusing on a potential Aol/Yahoo merger, or Yahoo’s acquisition by Aol or Microsoft, etc. Well, it seems the companies have officially become linked, but they’ve run into each other’s arms not by way of M&A, but by way of display ads. Yes, the three internet behemoths today announced agreements that they hope will improve the process of buying and selling premium online display inventory. In other words, the agreements will allow each to offer the other’s display ads to their respective customers.

With agencies and advertisers now able to pick and choose between Yahoo’s Network Plus, Aol’s Advertising.com and Microsoft’s Media network, each of which has different strengths in data, optimization, packaging, etc., this strategic partnership creates somewhat of a mega ad network. Online advertising is all about scale, and with this threefold growth in inventory, the three companies are looking to more quickly achieve the scale that is far more difficult to reach alone.

While the companies hope that this agreement will drive better returns for their customers (see Yahoo Executive VP Ross Levinsohn’s statement here), it remains to be seen just how “premium” the partnership’s ads will be. Premium ad inventories are inherently a product of scarcity, which seems to be a bit at odds with the scale/network approach the companies are taking, where nobody really knows what they’re selling.

What’s more, while this may improve the process of buying and selling online display inventory, it’s also a play to fend off the meteoric rise of Facebook (and, in turn, Google, which owns a 75 percent share of search advertising). Really, everyone is spending more time on Facebook, what with their measly 800 million users, and advertisers are following them there. To that point, Facebook now accounts for one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S. Up until now, no other web property in the U.S. really comes close. (See our coverage here.)

Thanks to the tables below from eMarketer, we see that Facebook leads the way in net display revenues in the U.S. with over $2 billion this year. Yahoo comes in second, with Microsoft and Aol far behind Google in third and fourth. The same ranking is true for share of the online display ad market, with Facebook holding 16 percent over Yahoo’s 13 percent — and eMarketer expects both Google and Facebook’s share to increase significantly next year to 19 percent and 12 percent, putting Google neck-and-neck with Yahoo.

What’s more, in terms of growth in online display advertising, Facebook saw a 66 percent increase this year, far outpacing the rest of the pack. I’ll hold off there, because you probably get the picture. Yahoo has the biggest ad network in terms of revenues and marketshare of this new ad trifecta, which certainly makes this an advantageous partnership for Microsoft and Aol, at least from this perspective.

But, in the end, at least for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to see this as anything but a bandaid. Facebook’s growth in display advertising isn’t slowing down any time soon.

Social TV app IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired earlier this year for $20 to $30 million, is heading to the iPad today with the launch of a native app.

In case you aren’t familiar with IntoNow, the service IntoNow, a new service that allows you to tell your friends what television shows and movies you’re watching in realtime. But unlike other media “check-in” services, you do this simply by hitting a button and letting your phone listen to what you’re watching. It’s that audio tracing technology that made it an appealing purchase for Yahoo, compared to the plethora of other social check-in apps.

Only launched in January, the startup’s iPhone and Android apps have already seen 1.6 million downloads and are seeing high levels of engagement as well.

Because the iPad is an ideal companion for watching TVs and movies, bringing IntoNow to the device has huge potential. In fact, IntoNow founder Adam Cahan tells us that studies have shown the most popular time to use tablet devices if while consumers are watching TV. According to Nielsen, over 70% of tablet owners and 68% of Smartphone owners say they use their devices while watching TV – much of the time to look up content about a show, piece of news, that they are watching.

And IntoNow’s new iPad app is probably its most feature rich offering yet. If a user ‘checks-in’ to a program like ABC News and the subject being talked about is politics, the IntoNow feed will begin to populate with the latest news in politics from many different sources to give the user contextual information. Additionally, when the subject switches to something completely different i.e. celebrity gossip, the app is ‘listening’ for the change and will begin to automatically fill the app with news about that celebrity, Tweets about the person/people, provide videos, etc.

The app is also ideal for watching sports. If you check-in to a particular football game, you won’t just see news and Tweets about the game, but Yahoo’s stat tracker will be pulled-up so you can immediately see the score, how many yards that QB has thrown for, who has scored the touchdowns, and more.

Clearly this is a big move in the Social TV space. The user doesn’t really have to do much beyond check-in to a show, and the app does all the work, pushes the curation of content.

Yahoo has just announced that it is purchasing Interclick, a data-driven ad network. The total acquisition price is around $270 million, or $9 per share.

Interclick is a technology company providing solutions for data-driven advertising. The Company’s proprietary Open Segment Manager (OSM) platform organizes and valuates billions of data points daily to construct the most responsive digital audiences for major digital marketers. Interclick’s proprietary advertising technology helps improve data targeting in online advertising and is optimized to work with large data volumes across multiple providers and marketplaces.

Yahoo’s EVP for the Americas Ross Levinsohn said in a release: “This investment underscores our focus on enhancing the performance of both our guaranteed and non-guaranteed display business across Yahoo and our partner sites and, combined with Yahoo’s reach and advertising leadership, will deliver a powerful solution for marketers…interclick’s innovative platform will allow Yahoo! to expand its targeting and data capabilities to deliver campaigns with stronger performance metrics.”

Interclick founder Michael Katz says that the company has already worked ‘closely’ with Yahoo over the past few years, and believes the ‘combination of Yahoo!’s premium data and inventory with our platforms will create tremendous value for clients.’

It’s an odd time for Yahoo to be announcing a major acquisition considering the company’s less than stellar financial situation, following the departure of CEO Carol Bartz and amidst reports of a possible takeover.

The deal is expected to close in early 2012.

UPDATING

As reported earlier this year, Yahoo and Benchmark Capital announced their backing and Apache Hadoop spin-off Hortonworks. The startup was launched to accelerate the adoption of Apache Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the world’s largest web sites.

Today, Hortonworks is debuting the Hortonworks Data Platform. The company also announced support and training offerings and partner enablement programs to aid enterprises, ISVs and systems integrators in implementing Apache Hadoop-based solutions.

The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) is a scalable, open and extensible platform powered by Apache Hadoop projects including the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase and Zookeeper. Also included are HCatalog, a metadata management service for simplifying data sharing between Hadoop and other enterprise information systems; Ambari, an open source installation and management system; and open HTTP/REST APIs that make it easier for ISVs to integrate and extend Apache Hadoop.

Hortonworks also announced support, training and enablement services for the entire Hadoop ecosystem. Hortonworks training offerings are designed to overcome Hadoop knowledge gaps for developers, architects and administrators. The startup says that all Hortonworks services are backed by the development team that has contributed the majority of code to the core Apache Hadoop projects.

TechCrunch TV is now really TechCrunch TV. When TCTV launched last year, the focus was on viewing our videos on the computer. Not on TV. Ok, we called it “TechCrunch TV” because it sounded a lot better than “TechCrunch Video”. But today, we are launching on the AOL HD platform and you can find us on your connected TV set.

Our videos are live on Roku, Boxee, Divx and Yahoo Connected TV platforms. Together, these platforms reach over 12 million devices. And that number is growing. A new report by Strategy Analytics says 42 million homes in the US and Europe are now using Connected TV devices. Don’t be surprised if more platforms get added to AOL HD as well. (AOL, the owner of TechCrunch, didn’t want me to say anything about that. Oh well.)

You can find these shows on the channel:

• Founder Stories: Chris Dixon takes and gives advice to entrepreneurs.
• Fly or Die: John Biggs and Erick Schonfeld give a “fly” or “die” verdict to new products.
• Keen On: Andrew Keen interviews leading thinkers and writers about technology issues.

We are working to get other shows like TC Cribs on the channel, but AOL HD plays only HD content and Cribs is shot in SD. We’ll be changing that soon.

Both on-stage and backstage videos from our Disrupt conferences are available, so you can watch those events from your living room.

The TechCrunch videos appear under AOL HD’s Technology channel, along with other videos from Engadget and Translogic. Robert DelaCruz, General Manager for AOL HD, says “I’m very pleased to include TechCrunch to the channel lineup. TechCrunch further strengthens AOL HD’s technology offering with the latest in technology, from breaking news to startups to gadgets.”

If you want to learn more or get installation instructions, head over to hd.aol.com. Otherwise, lean back and start watching us on your TV. Of course, you can continue to watch on your computer, mobile phone or tablet as well. Those hackers out there who were already using Airplay, or Apple TV, or other means to view our content on TV, will now be joined by a much larger group who can see TechCrunch TV on TV.

Yahoo reported third quarter earnings today. Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (“revenue ex-TAC”) was $1.072 billion for the third quarter of 2011, a 5 percent decrease from the third quarter of 2010. Net earnings per diluted share decreased 21 percent to $0.23 in the third quarter of 2011, compared to $0.29 in the third quarter of 2010. Yahoo actually beat Wall Street expectations; analysts expected earnings of $0.17 a share, on revenue of $1.09 billion.

Net income for the quarter came in at $293 million, down 26 percent from the same quarter in 2010. Income from operations decreased 6 percent to $177 million in the third quarter of 2011, compared to $189 million in the third quarter of 2010. The year over year decreases were primarily due to the revenue share related to the Search Agreement with Microsoft. GAAP revenue was $1.217 billion for the third quarter of 2011, a 24 percent decrease from the third quarter of 2010, again primarily due to the Search Agreement and the associated revenue share with Microsoft.

“We’re pleased that revenue, operating income and EPS were all above consensus this quarter,” said Tim Morse, CFO and Interim CEO, Yahoo. “My focus, and that of the whole company, is to move the business forward with new technology, partnerships, products, and premium personalized content — all with an eye toward growing monetization.”

Ad revenue was down across the board for Yahoo. Display revenue ex-TAC was $449 million, compared to $448 million for the third quarter of 2010. GAAP display revenue was $502 million, a decrease of 2 percent, compared to $514 million for the third quarter of 2010. Search revenue ex-TAC was $374 million, a 13 percent decrease compared to $428 million for the third quarter of 2010. GAAP search revenue was $467 million, a 44 percent decrease compared to $839 million for the third quarter of 2010.

Revenue ex-TAC for the fourth quarter of 2011 is expected to be in the range of $1.12 billion to $1.2 billion.

Of course it’s important to note that the company is in a state of flux at the moment, following the departure of CEO Carol Bartz and facing reports of a possible takeover.

We’ll be listening to the earnings call and will update with any additional information.

Earnings Call

Morse says the key operating takeaway is that the company remains focused on Yahoo’s key strategies, which includes personalization and content. Alluding to the future of Yahoo, (perhaps under a new ownership or in a takeover), Morse said Yahoo’s board is looking to return the company to a path of “robust growth” and is evaluating all options but when that happens, the board will make an announcement. Today, he said, he will only discuss the company’s Q3 results.

Morse says that there are some encouraging signs for Yahoo’s ad business, including a number of campaigns for big brands. Yahoo’s new video destination, Yahoo Screen, is also seeing success, he says.

The Microsoft search-transition is expected to be completed by next month.

He says that Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba is worth $14 billion, pre-tax (Yahoo paid $1 billion for a majority stake six years ago).

“We know we have to be easier to do business with, we know we have to be more flexible,” says Morse, in regard to the company’s reorganization of its sales force.

“We can do a better job of programming, optimizing our products, increasing page views,” he adds.

“The board’s process is the board’s process,” he said referring to Carol Bartz’s quick exit from the company. The CEO search is under way, Morse explained, but declined to comment further. As for the timelines, “the board wants to do what’s best for the company and the timing will be what it will be.”

As for why Yahoo didn’t participate in the latest sale of Alibaba’s shares, Morse said Yahoo was left out of the process because it was an employee sale (vs. an investor sale).

In terms of product, he says that the company has a better product planning process and the engineering talent is helping to ‘refresh’ the way Yahoo launched products.

Oh Yahoo!, you silly ol’ thing! According to an email that just came in from Yahoo’s digital marketing agency Something Massive, the struggling content company (platform company? advertising company?) wants us to talk about, tweet about and Facebook about their Yahoo! News Activity feature, and in return the company is promising lots of links and SEO juice. In case we forgot what Yahoo! News is, they helpfully linked to a TechCrunch post detailing the service’s social upgrade in September.

Well, here you go, Yahoo. You’re welcome. Can you please send over those half a million impressions you promised now? (P.S. By the way, “TechCrunch” is all one word.)

Dear Sarah,

My name is [redacted] and I work for Yahoo!’s digital marketing agency. We’ve been tasked with finding influencers to feature in a campaign around an announcement made at F8 a few weeks ago. We think you’re writing on Tech Crunch is great and that you reach an audience with a natural tendency to share and discover new things with their friends.

The F8 announcement was about a new product from Yahoo and Facebook called Yahoo! News Activity. For the next couple of weeks we will be featuring prominent bloggers as a part of our new “Featured Reader” campaign. We want to be able to show the feature in action by featuring one of your contributors!

Here’s how it works. As a “Featured Reader” in the campaign, you would receive:

-Prominent placement on the Yahoo! News Facebook (1.3+ million fans) including a photo, description, and quote.
-A featured placement for your blog and one blog post in rotation on the Yahoo! News site – the #1 news site on the web –  gaining you approximately 500,000 impressions
-Links back to your site

In exchange, we would ask that you:

-Try out our product, which enables Facebook friends to share and discover articles they read on Yahoo! News
-Talk about your participation as a post on your blog (could also be a badge or a link)
-Tweet and/or post to Facebook about your participation on the day you are a Featured Reader

You can check out the Facebook campaign we launched here: http://www.facebook.com/yahoonews?sk=app_137925272967648. It includes influencers like Andrew Gibbs of The Dieline and Matt Mullenweg who created WordPress.

You can learn more about the feature and read coverage about the announcement here:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/yahoo-news-teams-up-with-facebook-to-curate-content-from-your-friends/

Salim Ismail has one of the liveliest minds and most eclectic resumes in the Valley. The founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder of a number of interesting start-ups including Angstro and PubSub Concepts, he was also a VP at Yahoo! where he launched and ran Brickhouse, their internal incubator.

So, borrowing a familiar work from ex-Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, I asked Ismail if Yahoo! was now fucked. Yes, he confirmed, it was. And so, he added, was AOL and most other companies struggling to reinvent themselves in today’s increasingly brutal competitive landscape.

Vulgarity aside, Ismail’s message is incredibly important for every technology company struggling to maintain their innovation. Today’s Facebook or Twitter, he told me, is tomorrow’s Yahoo! So how, exactly, can a company build innovation into its DNA? What Salim Ismail says may seem, in some ways, obvious – but it’s actually the difference between Yahoo! and Google – the multi billion dollar difference between glittering success and abject failure in today’s creatively destructive economy.

For more on Salim Ismail’s interview, watch the video in this post from yesterday on the future of university education.

Yahoo and ABC just wrapped up a press conference at ABC’s Times Square studio to announce a major partnership between the two companies: they’re launching a new ‘News and Information Alliance’ that will see ABC News get a much more prominent presence throughout Yahoo. ABC News will also be launching several ‘web-first’ video series’ that will be appearing on Yahoo.

In short, Yahoo is reinventing its news site: ABC is bringing the premium content to the table, Yahoo is bringing its 100 million users.

A video played at the beginning of the conference made the mission clear: Yahoo and ABC News are gunning for CNN and other online news portals like The Huffington Post. To do that, Yahoo is augmenting its news articles with content produced by ABC News, including several new ‘web-first’ digital series featuring ABC News’s anchors. The video denounced the “blitz of headlines and information” seen across the web (they have a point), and says that the team are setting out to create richer stories.

The first video to be streamed as part of the partnership will be a live stream of George Stephanopoulos interviewing President Obama beginning at 2:35 PM EST this afternoon.

Yahoo and ABC say that “creativity is key” in the alliance — they’re looking to create content specifically suited for Yahoo’s web properties, as well as tablet and other mobile form factors. GoodMorningAmerica.com will be launching as a new portal on Yahoo News.

To monetize, at least initially, Yahoo and ABC will be selling advertising against its premium content. I asked if there were any plans to eventually monetize this content through in-app purchases and/or subscriptions. Ross Levinsohn, executive VP of Americas at Yahoo, didn’t rule it out, but says he isn’t going to predict the future. My hunch? Yep.

So is this a good move? I like it, though I want to see just what form this originally produced content takes, how long it remains exclusive on the web, and how much creativity will actually be involved. I think news on the web still has a long way to go, and more high-quality, premium content online is a good thing — and inevitable.

One reporter asked a series of questions about Carol Bartz, eventually asking Levinsohn if he’s gunning to take the helm. Levinsohn says this is the best job he’s had and gave an anecdote about his work history and talked about building good experiences (sounds like he’s saying “no”, but I’m not sure he explicitly said that at any point in his answer).

Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, Hellman & Friedman and Andreesen Horowitz, who have all reportedly reached out to Yahoo’s board.

Is Ma’s interest enough to spark consumer and shareholder interest in Yahoo? “Any and all interest [is] welcome,” one shareholder told me, “but Ma has real smarts.”

On the surface Ma is certainly the type of CEO that Yahoo needs post-Bartz, diplomatic, cunning, and a man of (relatively) few words. But would the deal make sense financially?

Alibaba Group’s recent funding from Silver Lake valued it at $32 billion, while Yahoo is at a 16 billion market cap. With Yahoo’s 40% stake in Alibaba Group valued at $12.8 billion, it seems like 80% of the company’s value is based on its Asian assets. Ma has apparently made it clear that he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his own company, and now he can for a bargain basement $3 billion premium –with hundreds of millions of US users thrown in for good measure.

Is the rest of Yahoo worth $3 billion? Probably. Plus Ma has an additional incentive to buy Yahoo because getting all those shares back frees him from his largest albatross shareholder. It’s a no brainer for Alibaba.

Would the Yahoo board take an offer from Ma? That remains to be seen, as the relationship between the two companies has been notoriously strained, most recently suffering because of accusations of unfair play on the part of Yahoo when Ma transferred ownership of Alipay to a separate company.

The sentiment among the former Yahoo employees I spoke to seems to be that Yahoo is so dysfunctional that they can’t see anything like this happening. And then there’s stigma; the general idea is to sell to someone you’re proud of like Google and Microsoft, not someone you used to own. The cultural fit between the Chinese and American companies is also quite awkward, as Sarah Lacy has documented comprehensively.

Despite this, many shareholders are just hoping for a decent price to exit their long-held positions, and Ma might be the company’s only hope for survival intact, as he is interested in Yahoo in its entirety. This is surprising: Yahoo is the type of company that Richard Gere in Pretty Woman would buy, and then break up — the individual pieces are more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Related: Looking up that YHOO ticker on Yahoo Finance is just depressing.

Image: Mick Orlosky