Key events involving Yahoo and its performance

Key events involving Yahoo and its performance

CEO Marissa Mayer marks her one-year anniversary at Yahoo this week. Here are key events involving Yahoo Inc. and its performance since she was appointed:

— July 16, 2012: Yahoo names longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer as its fifth CEO in as many years.

— July 17: On Mayer's first day on the job, Yahoo reports lackluster quarterly results, underscoring the challenges she will face.

— July 30: Yahoo announces Ross Levinsohn is leaving the company. He served as Yahoo's interim CEO but lost to Mayer for the permanent appointment.

— Sept. 18: Yahoo completes a long-awaited, $7.6 billion deal for Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group to buy back half of Yahoo's 40 percent stake. Most of the proceeds will go to its shareholders, but Yahoo still has an extra $1.3 billion to finance acquisitions or hire new talent.

— Sept. 25: Software industry veteran Ken Goldman is named chief financial officer, replacing Tim Morse, as Mayer moves swiftly to build her senior management team.

— Oct. 22: In the first quarter under Mayer, Yahoo reports third-quarter results that topped analyst estimates. Yahoo's net revenue barely grew at a time when advertisers are spending more money marketing their products and services online. Nevertheless, the numbers were slightly better than analysts projected.

— Jan. 28, 2013: Although Yahoo still isn't keeping pace with the overall growth of the Internet ad market, the company says it fared well enough during the fourth quarter to produce its first full-year gain in revenue since 2008. It was a scant increase: just $2.4 million higher than 2011's total of nearly $5 billion.

— Feb. 12: Mayer tells an audience of investors that Yahoo will be better served with just 12 to 15 mobile applications, down from a "scattered" portfolio of as many as 75 different programs in recent years.

— Feb. 20: Yahoo unveils a long-awaited makeover of its home page to get people to visit more frequently and linger for longer periods of time. It's the first time Yahoo has redesigned the page in four years. Yahoo says it has developed more sophisticated formulas to determine which topics are most likely to appeal to different people so the news feed can be fine-tuned to cater to different tastes.

— March 6: Yahoo discloses that Mayer received a $1.1 million bonus for her first five-and-half months running the Internet company. She was eligible for an annual bonus of up to $2 million. Yahoo adjusted it to reflect that Mayer spent less than half the year as CEO.

— March 20: Yahoo says it has bought Silicon Valley startup Jybe so it can bring back five of its former engineers to help the Internet company build better mobile applications.

— March 25: Yahoo says it is buying London startup Summly, the maker of a mobile application created by teenage entrepreneur seeking an easier way to read news stories and other content on the smaller screens of smartphones.

— April 16: A drop in Yahoo's ad revenue during the first three months of the year overshadows a 36 percent increase in earnings that topped analyst forecasts. Mayer says the company is engaged in a "series of sprints" that will culminate in more robust growth.

— April 18: Yahoo releases new mobile apps.

— April 25: Yahoo says Chairman Alfred Amoroso will become the eighth director to leave since early 2012. The departure is effective June 25. Amoroso is giving up the chairmanship immediately. Maynard Webb Jr. will handle the duties on an interim basis. Amoroso, who became chairman 11 months earlier after Thompson left, says he had intended to serve as chairman for only a year.

— May 20: Yahoo announces a deal to buy online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Mayer is betting that Tumblr will provide Yahoo with a captivating hook to reel in more traffic and advertisers on smartphones and tablet computers. More than half of Tumblr's users connect through the mobile app and engage in an average of seven sessions per day.

— July 16: Yahoo says earnings are still rising, but the second-quarter results also highlight the challenges facing the company as it loses ground to Google and Facebook in online advertising. After stripping out ad commissions, Yahoo's revenue came to $1.07 billion in the April-June period. That is slightly below analyst projections and marks a 1 percent decline from last year. It's the first time that Yahoo's net revenue has fallen since Mayer took over.