Yahoo is "deep into" an effort to improve its products and traffic, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said during a Tuesday earnings call, which saw lower-than-expected revenue for the second quarter.
Revenue for the quarter came in at $1.07 billion, a 1 percent decrease from the same time period last year, though earnings landed at $335 million, up from $228 million in 2012.
"I'm encouraged by Yahoo's performance in the second quarter. Our business saw continued stability, and we launched more products than ever before, introducing a significant new product almost every week," Mayer said.
Today's earnings live-stream comes on the one-year anniversary of Mayer being named Yahoo's CEO. When she arrived 364 days ago, there was a "lack of focus" and vision that clouded the business, Mayer said today. "Today, I don't feel that," she said, pointing to employee-driven initiatives and a decrease in the usual bureaucracy.
"We have created a new, super-charged Yahoo," Mayer said.
That's evident in the number of resumes Yahoo received in the second quarter; nearing 10,000 in one week alone. Attrition, meanwhile, has dropped 59 percent year over year, while 10 percent of new hires are "boomerangs," or those who left Yahoo but have returned, she said. Overall headcount, however, is down 9 percent from the year-ago quarter.
In that year, she has made a number of acquisitions - from the $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr to news app Summly - all of which "bring sophisticated technology and intellectual property to strengthen our product portfolio," Mayer said today.
Mayer also revamped a number of Yahoo services, basically unveiling a new product each week to make Q2 the company's most productive quarter yet, she said. There was a new homepage, updated Yahoo Mail, and the Flickr-enhanced weather app.
Daily active users are up 120 percent across Yahoo's mobile mail apps, while Yahoo logged a 55 percent upswing in daily active users of its Summly-enhanced Yahoo apps and 60 percent increase in time spent using those apps.
A May update to Flickr, which boosted free storage to 1 terabyte, helped increase daily photos uploads by a factor of four - and sometimes by a factor of seven.
Mayer gave herself an "A" for mobile this year, with Yahoo topping 340 million monthly mobile users this quarter. "Yahoo's future is mobile, and we're delivering our products mobile first," she said.
Going forward, Yahoo's focus will be focused on four core areas: search, mobile, display, and video. "Our teams are now delivering a velocity of product launches that will fundamentally change our business," she said.