As the earnings report date is getting nearer and nearer, Yahoo is feeling the pressure, although its stock has settled at $16.50 after a 52-week period at $12.94.  Yahoo has not had any revenue growth in its core US market–it has only had short seller activity in the last period and it is also rumored that there are plans of selling the assets in the Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan.

Wall Street analysts mentioned an expected revenue of $1.19 billion, less that the revenue for 2010 due to less income from advertisement declines in search ad revenue at Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has made some promises when taking the lead of the company, but until now nothing has materialized, apart from the layoff of 650 employees, what has not improved the situation very much.

Gloomy periods have started with Yahoo’s intentions of shutting down services like MyBlogLog, Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Yahoo’s traffic APIs and recently bookmarking service Delicious. The next step taken by Yahoo was to partner with smaller companies such as Zynga, so as to bring in new customers.

The rebranding process of Yahoo is still taking place, as Yahoo teamed up with Google and AOL.  The company recently looked to Microsoft, a larger and mature company, for finding a viable solution.  It may work out for Yahoo and Microsoft in the end, though the greatest competitor for Yahoo is the social network, Facebook.   According to a ComScore report, Yahoo had 630 million visitors in November 2010, while the latter went as high as having 648 million visitors.

As you can see from this Focus infographic below, Yahoo’s had quite a ride these last few years. Having been created in 1994 by two graduate students, Yahoo took shape in 1995, by the next year managing to raise funds worth of $2 million. During the next 5 years, Yahoo goes on the stock market closing at $43 and purchasing numerous smaller companies. Starting around 2001, Yahoo does not do well on the stock market and intends to buy Google, but the latter refuses the deal.

Yahoo redirects itself, and begins to launch its own web-crawling algorithm, opening the Yahoo Research Lab. The outcome is not as expected and Facebook and YouTube develop in the wake, taking a new direction for search and content distribution, challenging more companies than just Yahoo. The company loses focus and CEOs leave one by one. Right up to 2008, Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo is declined, and from here Carol Bartz takes on a sinking ship.