It’s well known that Yahoo, Inc.’s glory days are long behind it but one little-known fact is that its core products, search, mail, and its home page, have remained relatively strong… that is until now.

According to internal data obtained by The Information, Yahoo’s core products may have entered a death spiral, with traffic down across the board.

Daily active users going to Yahoo’s home page fell 16.5 percent in the first week of December 2015, compared to the same period in 2014, while traffic to Yahoo Mail dropped 11.5 percent and Yahoo Search dropped 8.8 percent.

The raw numbers themselves are still fairly high, with the homepage reporting 52.6 million daily active users, Mail 56.9 million and search at 43.5 million, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the percentage drops, if continued into 2016, shows that Yahoo is bleeding traffic to its core products.

There were apparently some bright spots for Yahoo, though, with Tumblr doing relatively well and Yahoo Weather said to be a bright spot, primarily off the back of its popularity as a mobile weather app.

The report notes also that Yahoo’s decline may be driven by the fact that it has completely missed the boat on mobile, with only 22 percent of Yahoo’s home page daily users accessing the site via their smartphones, compared to 90 percent for Facebook.

Dead in the water

Yahoo’s problems have been well publicized of late, from their decision to lay off 15 percent of their staff to the mess about spinning off its stake in Alibaba, then selling itself minus its Alibaba stake.

Through all of that, there have been a perceived value in Yahoo’s core assets, which despite Yahoo’s struggles in its various other verticals were its proverbial rock of Gibraltar.

Presuming The Information’s data is correct, the decline in the core assets doesn’t just affect those services alone, but the entirety of Yahoo’s business as the front page, in particular, is the key driver of traffic into Yahoo’s verticals. Put simply, if traffic is significantly down on the front page, it’s down across every Yahoo property (with the exception of Tumblr) because that’s where the majority of the referral traffic comes from.

The decline in mail and search will also hurt it but in a different way: Yahoo uses mail for data mining for ad placement while search is a primary source of revenue; both of them declining will ultimately hurt Yahoo’s bottom line not just now, but going forward as well.

There’s no recent word as to how far Yahoo has progressed in selling itself off. But given someone as smart as Marissa Meyer has failed to turn the company around, who would want to buy a company that is now essentially dead in the water?

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