While Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer has done a great job winning over the media, it’s her fellow Google alum, AOL boss Tim Armstrong, who’s doing the better job of winning over advertisers.
Armstrong’s AOL on Thursday reported another solid quarter, with advertising revenue jumping 23 percent compared to last year, to $507 million.
It was the sixth straight quarter of increased ad revenue.
Meanwhile, Mayer’s Yahoo1 is in a funk — having struggled through six straight quarters of declining ad revenue.
“Market share is moving to Tim,” said Laura Martin, Needham & Co. analyst, who has a buy on AOL and a hold on Yahoo!.
“Tim is focused on solving problems for advertisers; that is his total focus,” Martin said. “Marissa’s focus is technology and product and getting great people to come to Yahoo!, but she has to create products to enter the marketplace before she can monetize. We’re waiting to see.”
Over the last six months, Yahoo! shares have gained 32.6 percent while AOL is up 30.3 percent.
Armstrong is hoping his changes will widen that gulf down the road.
“We served 4.3 billion video ads in December, setting a new industry record and making us No. 1 in video ads served for the third consecutive month,” Armstrong boasted to analysts on a conference call.
The news is significant because the ad dollars are chasing video, not text — and both AOL and Yahoo! know it.
The cost-per-thousand customers, or CPMs, are upward of $18 for video and begin at $3 for text.
Armstrong and Meyer have different businesses and different challenges, but both former Google executives are looking to Madison Avenue to fuel their growth.
While Armstrong has a huge headstart — he began in March 2009, Meyer has been at Yahoo! for about 16 months — it looks like AOL is winning as the two brands duke it out for dollars.
“Tim Armstrong was always a New York ad-centric guy, while Marissa Meyer was the Silicon Valley executive who was much more product-centric,” Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser told The Post.
So far, the downside of Mayer’s inability to boost sales has been muted because it owns a 24 percent stake in giant e-commerce company Alibaba.
But Yahoo! will have to sell a chunk of that holding when Alibaba goes public — and then the difference between the two companies could become very clear.