Yahoo! (YHOO): Reorganizing sales won't matter

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) pushed out its head of sales and combined his operations with the company's business development group. It hardly matters.

According to (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal: "Yahoo is creating a new Global Partner Solutions division that will oversee its relationships with advertisers, Web publishers, developers and others." But the web portal may be in a position where management cannot fix the problem. In the last quarter, the company's revenue grew to $1.698 billion from $1.576 billion.

It is well described that Yahoo!'s main business of display advertising has watched its growth slow across the industry, and that it missed the boat on search-based text ads. The company can make some money off it jobs business and premium products like real-time stock quotes, but these are essentially fairly small for a $6.5 billion company.

Yahoo! has to acquire its way out of its problems, but taking a chance that social networking will bring the next important wave of internet ad dollars.

Buying growth is all the company has left.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.