Yahoo! sales miss profit estimates

Yahoo! Inc, the most-visited US Web portal, reported revenue that missed estimates as marketers favored competing sites and a sales-team shakeup made it harder to clinch advertising orders. Shares fell in late trading.

Excluding sales passed on to partner sites, second-quarter revenue slipped 4.6 per cent from a year earlier to $1.08 billion, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said in a statement. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had estimated $1.11 billion.

Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz led a US sales team overhaul that caused greater-than-expected turnover, while Yahoo suffered as rivals Facebook Inc. and Google Inc did a better job getting Web surfers to linger. Yahoo is expected to cede its spot as the top seller of display advertising in the US to Facebook this year, according to researcher EMarketer Inc.

“It’s almost hard to believe they can continue to disappoint the Street, which we thought had fairly weak expectations, but they’ve done that,” said Clayton Moran, an analyst at Benchmark Co in Boca Raton, Florida.

In display ads — the banner messages or video clips that flank websites — Yahoo said sales, excluding funds passed to partners, climbed 5 per cent. That fell short of Moran’s 13 per cent projection.