By Douglas MacMillan 

Nearly three years into Marissa Mayer's attempt to turn around Yahoo Inc., the business is still shrinking.

On Tuesday, Yahoo reported its revenue from display advertisements and search ads both fell for the first time in years. Display-ad revenue, a continuing sore point for the company, dropped 7% to $381 million in the first quarter, excluding commissions paid to partners. Search-ad revenue, which had grown every quarter under Ms. Mayer, declined 3% to $432 million, excluding the traffic costs.

The poor results cast doubt on Ms. Mayer's ability to grow the aging Internet portal she took over in July 2012. Yahoo's investments in emerging areas like mobile and video advertising have failed to create a growth engine large enough to offset the company's declining business of display ads shown on desktop computers. The decline in search revenue only adds to the concerns, especially at a time when Yahoo has signaled it would bolster its search technology.

Amid the lackluster performance, Ms. Mayer is trying to shift investors' focus to the emerging areas by grouping them into one category on the earnings report, called "Mavens"--an acronym for mobile, video, native and social advertising. Mavens revenue makes up about one-third of the company's total, growing 58% to $363 million in the first quarter. All other revenue declined 7% to $744 million from a year earlier.

"Our Mavens strategy is core to our growth because it counteracts declines in our legacy business," Ms. Mayer said on the earnings conference call with analysts.

Now that Ms. Mayer has drawn attention to these emerging businesses, there is pressure on her to show they can grow fast enough to offset declines in desktop ads. The CEO set a timeline on that goal earlier this year, when she predicted in a memo to employees that "2015 is the year that we return our display revenue to growth."

Investors are putting more scrutiny on Yahoo's core business as the company prepares to spin off its shares of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Holding Group Ltd. in a transaction scheduled for later this year. On the earnings call, Ms. Mayer said it has hired advisers to explore a plan for unlocking value from its shares in Yahoo Japan, an asset valued at billions of dollars.

Under pressure from activist investor Starboard Value LP to reduce costs, Yahoo cut 1,100 employees last quarter, mostly from offices outside the U.S.

Yahoo is expected to see its share of the U.S. display-ad revenue market slip to 4.6% of the total this year, down from 5.5% in 2014, according to eMarketer Inc. The online ad researcher predicts Twitter Inc. will surpass Yahoo this year to become the third-largest seller of U.S. display ads, trailing Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

Search has become more of a priority for Ms. Mayer, who previously helped build Google's search engine. The CEO has invested in building new search technologies and negotiated to control up to 49% of searches done on desktops under the terms of Yahoo's partnership with Microsoft Corp., which was amended this month.

On the call with analysts, Ms. Mayer said that rather than crawl the entire Web, she hopes to build new search tools that can compete with Apple Inc.'s Siri service and Google Now, more "action-oriented" search products.

Yahoo didn't detail the quarterly financial performance for Tumblr, the blogging service it purchased for nearly $1 billion in 2013, but said the unit is still on track to generate $100 million this year.

The company's first-quarter profit and revenue numbers both missed analysts' estimates. Profit fell to $21.2 million, or two cents a share, down from $311.6 million, or 29 cents a share. Excluding certain items, the company's per-share earnings fell to 15 cents a share from 38 cents a share.

Revenue, minus commissions paid to search partners, fell to $1.04 billion from $1.09 billion.

Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of 18 cents a share on revenue of $1.06 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com

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