Mayer's first-year report card at Yahoo! Even a TV newscast can't hide some tough facts

Here are some of the comments:

WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Marissa Mayer delivered another mixed report card on her yearlong turnaround effort, showing a 46% jump in quarterly earnings - but continued revenue declines that underscore her challenges.

"Ms. Mayer's willingness to sacrifice immediate gains as she positions the company for future growth has led to the continued deterioration of its core business of selling online ads. Yahoo posted a second-quarter revenue drop of 7%,

"Yahoo's display-ad revenue, roughly 40% of the company's sales, dropped 12% on declines in the number and prices of graphical and video ads. Search-ad revenue fell 9%."

Yahoo's profit, said the WSJ, was buoyed by the strong performance of China-based e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., in which Yahoo holds a 23.5% stake.

Sameet Sinha, a stock analyst at B. Riley & Co said investors were disappointed with Yahoo's outlook for the year. The company said it expects revenue to rise roughly 0.7% in 2013, lower than the 1.8% hike projected in its previous quarterly report.

The results initially caused a 2% drop in in after-hours trading, though the shares later bounced back, trading up two cents to $26.90. The stock is up more than 70% from a year ago, thanks largely to the Alibaba stake.

FORBES: "Mayer unveiled a little surprise on an investors giving her earnings report in the form of a video webcast modeled after a TV newscast.

"Is seeing believing? Maybe not quite, but it’s not so much belief Mayer is asking from Wall Street at the moment as suspension of disbelief, and she’s doing fine on that score.

"By all indications, middling numbers like the ones Yahoo just announced for the second quarter — revenue flat at $1.07 billion, display ad revenues down double digits — won’t be held against her for a few more quarters yet, with the company’s stake in Alibaba propping up shares and the appetite to change CEOs yet again at nil."

Mayer nevertheless did her best to put a smiley face on the numbers, said Forbes, pointing out that efforts including a much-touted redesign of its homepage resulted in a reversal of a long-term decline in overall traffic late in the second quarter.

“Renewed traffic growth among players with billions of page views is, to my knowledge, unprecedented,” she said.

Also growing is Tumblr, bought for $1.1 billion. “Since the deal, Tumblr’s growth has seen an acceleration, with almost a quarter of a million new blogs being set up each day,” she said.

But that growth, said Forbes, doesn’t translate into the revenue growth Yahoo keenly needs, and it won’t for some time. Mayer struck a bullish note on Tumblr’s ad sales strategy, saying, “[Founder/CEO] David Karp and I firmly beleve native advertising can be every bit as good as the content itself and Yahoo intends to develop monetization that meets that standard.”

But as for contributing much more to the corporate coffers this year than the $13 million it booked in the first quarter, you can forget about it. “We don’t believe that Tumblr…will provide meaningful revenue this year,” Mayer said. “There will be some, but it won’t be meaningful.”

HUFFPO: : "Mayer's splashy $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr and a leaked memo about the perils of working from home, produced a perfect storm of storylines to put Yahoo back in the spotlight."

But ...While the appointment of 38-year-old woman is CEO has been great for publicity, Yahoo's future is still up for debate says Huffpo.

Yahoo's stock was $27.34 at Monday's close up 74.6 percent from Mayer's first day.

Glassdoor, a job search site, found that 84 percent of Yahooers approve of the company's direction under Mayer. Rating their level of satisfaction from 1 to 5, Yahoo employees gave an average score of 3.7 during Mayer's tenure.

But are ordinary people using Yahoo's websites more? Yahoo's share of traffic for its search engine, which competes with Google and Bing, is down to its lowest level ever, according to data fromcomScore.

Traffic on Yahoo's homepage has edged up in 2013 after declining through the previous year. The difference? Maybe the Facebook-like makeover Mayer gave Yahoo's homepage in February.

MERCURY NEWS: Yahoo's most important advertising business has continued to show an alarming decline, says home state paper the Mercury News. And analysts say Yahoo is far from out of the woods.

"Yahoo is trying to sell a product that fewer and fewer advertisers want," warned Karsten Weide, a media analyst for the IDC research firm. "They've been consistently losing market share."

Mayer has warned that Yahoo's turnaround will take several years. Even so, she insists the company is on its way after a series of high-profile moves aimed at boosting internal morale and redesigning the company's online services for smartphones and other mobile gadgets, which a growing number of Internet consumers are using instead of desktop computers.