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Go to the Yahoo Small Business homepage, and you’ll be informed that "PC Magazine named us ‘Editors’ Choice.’"  It seems that not many other entities are interested in either Yahoo’s small business unit or HotJobs, however, as plans to sell both may have fallen through.

More than six months ago, reports indicated that Yahoo was trying to get rid of these divisions as Carol Bartz tried to focus on Yahoo’s core interests.  Intermittent reports since then hinted that Yahoo’s had difficulty getting other organizations to consider its asking prices.

Now, with respect to Yahoo Small Business, Jeff Bercovici wrote, "[A]fter finding a shortage of interest, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet firm has put the sale on hold, according to a source close to the situation."

And Rafat Ali added, "Also, we have been hearing that its jobs site Hotjobs’ sale process is not going well . . . .  Not a single confirmed bid came in when the process started, our sources say."

So it sounds as if Yahoo’s garage sale wasn’t exactly successful.  The big question is whether the company will lower its expectations and try again, or decide to keep Yahoo Small Business and HotJobs, after all.

CORRECTION: Whoops, sorry everybody (including Yahoo) . . . turns out at least half of this information was wrong.  Monster announced its acquisition of HotJobs this afternoon.

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Most estimates agree that there are almost 7 billion human beings on this planet, and even the biggest misanthropes must admit that a few of them are smart and capable.  Yahoo apparently wasn’t able to encounter any keepers, however, as it’s stopped searching for someone to lead the company’s international division.

This position opened up in February of 2009 as Carol Bartz really began to reshape operations at Yahoo.  Now, as reported by John Letzing, Bartz said during yesterday’s earnings call, "I didn’t find anyone who was up to our needs."

Some critics might take this as an admission of defeat; it seems a bit ridiculous that a year-long hunt didn’t turn up anything.  Or perhaps even scary, if Yahoo located some qualified candidates, but said candidates didn’t want to work for the company.

Still, the timing of Bartz’s announcement goes a long ways towards making things look better.  Yahoo’s Q4 report was pretty good, after all – its stock rose in after-hours trading and is still headed up this morning – so this position appears to be less than critical.

When everything’s said and done, the new plan is for three Yahoo executives (Hilary Schneider, Rose Tsou, and Rich Riley) representing the Americas, Asia, and EMEA to report directly to Bartz.

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Fair warning: this is not a report upon which you should rearrange your stock portfolio.  Please don’t even bet anyone a significant amount of money.  Just the same, Carol Bartz appears to have given a hint that she’s interested in acquiring Yelp.

Brian Womack recently interviewed Bartz, and at one point, asked her about buying the site known for its fast-growing collection of local reviews.  Bartz, who is in turn known for speaking plainly, didn’t give a "yes" or "no" (or "heck yes" or "heck no") answer.

Instead, Yahoo’s CEO said, "Local is extremely important.  People do some outrageous percentage of their commercial spending five miles from their home."  Which kind of sounds like "that’s a good idea."

Of course, even if Bartz had answered in the affirmative, the odds don’t favor anything happening.  Late last year, the rumor mill indicated that Google trying to acquire Yelp, and if Google’s popularity and deeper pockets couldn’t secure a deal, it’s hard to imagine Yahoo succeeding.

So again, this isn’t a concrete, "Yahoo will acquire Yelp" announcement so much as an exercise in parsing CEO’s sentences.  Hat tip goes to Jay Yarow.

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Yahoo has partnered with Ben Silverman’s production company Electus, in which Electus will develop and produce premium content for Yahoo and its advertisers.

The partnership is aimed at driving creativity in online programming. Electus will develop a number of original video concepts for Yahoo in partnership with advertisers.  The specific types of projects were not announced.

"Content creators and producers are looking for more direct relationships with their audiences and advertising partners, and this partnership will allow advertisers to have fresh ideas matched with premium experiences that enable their messages to be delivered directly to their consumers," said Ben Silverman, CEO of Electus.

"Yahoo! is the ideal partner for this initiative; not only do they have the audience reach and a deep understanding of what consumers want, but they have a long history of successful custom campaigns that deliver for all partners involved. And this deal moves them even further along that path."

Electus said the partnership with Yahoo is the first of a number it plans on announcing in the coming months.

"Yahoo! is bringing together the worlds of entertainment and advertising to build differentiated experiences that help redefine branded entertainment," said Joanne Bradford, senior vice president of North America revenue and market development at Yahoo!

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Yahoo has partnered with Ben Silverman’s production company Electus, in which Electus will develop and produce premium content for Yahoo and its advertisers.

The partnership is aimed at driving creativity in online programming. Electus will develop a number of original video concepts for Yahoo in partnership with advertisers.  The specific types of projects were not announced.

"Content creators and producers are looking for more direct relationships with their audiences and advertising partners, and this partnership will allow advertisers to have fresh ideas matched with premium experiences that enable their messages to be delivered directly to their consumers," said Ben Silverman, CEO of Electus.

"Yahoo! is the ideal partner for this initiative; not only do they have the audience reach and a deep understanding of what consumers want, but they have a long history of successful custom campaigns that deliver for all partners involved. And this deal moves them even further along that path."

Electus said the partnership with Yahoo is the first of a number it plans on announcing in the coming months.

"Yahoo! is bringing together the worlds of entertainment and advertising to build differentiated experiences that help redefine branded entertainment," said Joanne Bradford, senior vice president of North America revenue and market development at Yahoo!

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Carol Bartz is five days away from her one-year anniversary as Yahoo’s CEO, and in that time, she feels she’s done a fairly decent job of leading the company.  In a recent interview, Bartz graded her performance as B- material.

Bartz indicated to Brian Womack that speed (or actually, a lack thereof) might have been her biggest problem.  She said "she could have moved faster to reorganize the company and strike a Web-search agreement with Microsoft," Womack reported.

Bartz also stated, "It was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated.  I did move fast, but this is a big job."

Feel free to use the comments section to say what grade you think Bartz deserves.  A point in her favor: during the past year, the value of Yahoo’s stock has risen by 36.66 percent.

A couple of points against: in the same stretch, the Nasdaq’s gone up 49.46 percent, and Microsoft’s proposed acquisition would have been significantly more profitable for shareholders.

Anyway, with regards to the future, Womack wrote, "Bartz said she plans to do more acquisitions this year, probably of less than $1 billion apiece.  Potential targets include overseas companies and data-analytics businesses that help advertisers assess their results."

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At the moment, the Zimbra homepage bears a "BUY ZIMBRA" button and a stamp reading "a Yahoo division."  But according to a new report, a sale of Zimbra (and not just a Zimbra product) may soon take place, making "a VMware division" a more accurate statement.

Kara Swisher wrote earlier today, "Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation. . . .  Sources said the deal will be announced soon, but the price for the open-source email unit was still unclear."

Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million towards the end of 2007, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the price has gone up or down since then.  No overly nasty rumors appear to be in circulation now, at least, considering that Yahoo’s stock rose by 1.91 percent today.  (For reference: the Dow and Nasdaq went up 1.50 percent and 1.73 percent, respectively, so this isn’t amazing.)

Anyway, a development along these lines wasn’t unexpected.  Yahoo’s been unloading properties for a while thanks to Carol Bartz’s get-back-to-basics directive, and in October, Zimbra’s former president and CTO also left the company.

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Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

We learned that Yahoo would be closing the door on GeoCities back in April, so users have had plenty of time to migrate to other services. Earlier this year, for example, MSN partnered with WetPaint  to allow people to create "fansites". After Yahoo’s announcement, Wetpaint took the opportunity to announce a "bailout plan for foreclosed GeoCities properties," which it called the "GeoCities Asset Recovery Plan (GARP)."As it shuts down GeoCities, Yahoo itself is now plugging its own $4.99-a-month Web hosting service.

Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do?  Yahoo’s way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

"Then there’s the fact that Google, not Yahoo, appears to be responsible for the lion’s share of GeoCities referrals, sending about 31.45 percent of the site’s traffic its way," noted Doug Caverly upon Yahoo’s original announcement. "Yahoo’s only behind of 16.89 percent of all GeoCities visits. So by closing GeoCities, for which it paid $3.6 billion in 1999, Yahoo seems to be turning its back on a large amount of traffic.  Moreover, it’s turning down free traffic from its biggest competitor." 

"Carol Bartz may be trying to get Yahoo’s costs under control, but it looks like sticking a ‘for sale’ sign on GeoCities would be at least one preferable option compared to a closure," he added.

But alas, it looks like the sign reads "closed" rather than "for sale." So say goodbye, and in the words of Richard Marxx, "hold on to the memory."

It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users? After all, it was the GeoCities users that built their sites, promoted them and put up with sometimes annoying ads. A simple forwarding of their GeoCities url to their new home would be appreciated! Do you agree?

MySpace isn’t exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it. What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished? Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t getting use out of them. They’re obviously getting page views.

Here’s what Yahoo is telling GeoCities users to do if they want to keep their sites:

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you’d like to keep your web site, you’ll need to move your site files to another web hosting provider.

We recommend moving to our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.

Perhaps it’s not worth it to users to go throgh the hassle of migration, but it has been nice to have their GeoCities site at least remain in tact. Well, tough luck. I hope you’ve gotten what you wanted away from it before Yahoo obliterates it. There are some sites out there that have not yet been shut down, but it appears that is only a matter of time.

What do you think of Yahoo’s decision to simply shut down GeoCities? Discuss here.

Remembering GeoCities

GeoCities held a lot of web memories for a lot of people. There was a time where you could barely surf the web without running into one GeoCities site or another. Wikipedia provides a little history:

GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods". The neighborhood included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995 Geocities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill," "Paris," "SiliconValley," and "Tokyo." By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was signing up thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting over six million monthly page views. The company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages.

"It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet," writes Mark Milian with the LA Times.

In early 1999, Yahoo purchased Geocities for about $3.57 billion in stock. Now a decade later, Geocities is no more.

Do you have fond memories of the Geocities days? Should Yahoo be obligated to forward GeoCities pages to your new site? What if Facebook, MySpace or Twitter suddenly shut down? Should there be a web or social homesteading bill of rights?

>>> Share your thoughts below …

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Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities today. The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

We learned that Yahoo would be closing the door on GeoCities back in April, so users have had plenty of time to migrate to other services. Earlier this year, for example, MSN partnered with WetPaint  to allow people to create "fansites". After Yahoo’s announcement, Wetpaint took the opportunity to announce a "bailout plan for foreclosed GeoCities properties," which it called the "GeoCities Asset Recovery Plan (GARP)."

As it shuts down GeoCities, Yahoo itself is now plugging its own $4.99-a-month Web hosting service.

GeoCities held a lot of web memories for a lot of people though. There was a time where you could barely surf the web without running into one GeoCities site or another. Wikipedia provides a little history:

GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods". The neighborhood included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995 Geocities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill," "Paris," "SiliconValley," and "Tokyo." By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was signing up thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting over six million monthly page views. The company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages.

"It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet," writes Mark Milian with the LA Times.

In early 1999, Yahoo purchased Geocities for about $3.57 billion in stock. Now a decade later, Geocities is no more.

Yahoo’s way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

"Then there’s the fact that Google, not Yahoo, appears to be responsible for the lion’s share of GeoCities referrals, sending about 31.45 percent of the site’s traffic its way," noted Doug Caverly upon Yahoo’s original announcement. "Yahoo’s only behind of 16.89 percent of all GeoCities visits. So by closing GeoCities, for which it paid $3.6 billion in 1999, Yahoo seems to be turning its back on a large amount of traffic.  Moreover, it’s turning down free traffic from its biggest competitor." 

"Carol Bartz may be trying to get Yahoo’s costs under control, but it looks like sticking a ‘for sale’ sign on GeoCities would be at least one preferable option compared to a closure," he added.

But alas, it looks like the sign reads "closed" rather than "for sale." So say goodbye, and in the words of Richard Marxx, "hold on to the memory."

Do you have fond memories of the Geocities days? Share them below.

Related Articles:

> GeoCities Users Get a Bailout From Wetpaint

> Yahoo Failing To Consider GeoCities Alternatives?

> Yahoo Turning Lights Out At GeoCities

Yahoo may not exactly have come out on top, but it doesn’t need to worry about a DivX lawsuit any longer.  The two companies have reached a settlement, and it looks like DivX received a considerable sum of money.

DivX accused Yahoo in November of abandoning a two-year advertising services agreement.  Dan Halvorson, Executive Vice President and CFO of DivX, sort of announced a win in a statement yesterday by saying, "We are pleased to have this matter resolved."

He then launched right into a finance-related discussion.

"The litigation settlement will increase our operating income in the third quarter of 2009," Halvorson continued.  "As a result, we have upwardly revised our GAAP earnings guidance for the third quarter by $0.29 per diluted share, or $0.17 per diluted share net of related taxes, and now expect GAAP earnings to be in the range of $0.10 to $0.12 per diluted share."

So Yahoo paid DivX something in the neighborhood of $9.5 million, according to Joseph Tartakoff’s math.

That can’t thrill Carol Bartz, who’s been trying hard to reduce costs and save money since taking over the company.  Still, since Yahoo agreed to the settlement, the payout presumably represents a better alternative than continuing to fight the lawsuit.