Yahoo left out something important when it said users haven't fled since its big hack (YHOO)

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Yahoo had one main objective when it reported Q3 results on Tuesday: to show Wall Street that there hasn't been a mass exodus of users after the news of its big hack attack. 

To make the case, Yahoo showed off several charts that indicated healthy traffic trends across its websites.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a statement that she was "heartened" by its users' "continued loyalty as seen in our user engagement trends."

Yahoo's stock was up about 1.5% in after hours trading on Tuesday, despite a steep 14% decline in core revenue.

So at the very least Yahoo managed to prevent investors from panicking that the hack had triggered the dreaded user exodus. That's critical, given that Yahoo is in the process of being acquired by Verizon for $4.8 billion — any evidence of a "material" impact on Yahoo's business gives Verizon an opening to bargain for a lower deal price.

But there's a couple problems with Yahoo's assurances of user loyalty.

Loyal users?

As a reminder, Yahoo revealed on September 22 that it had suffered a massive security breach in late 2014. Yahoo blamed the incident on a "state sponsored actor" and said the hackers stole personal information such as names, passwords and dates of birth of more than 500 million Yahoo users.  

Here's the chart Yahoo showed to assuage worries of user desertions:

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These charts all show that traffic in the weeks after Yahoo revealed the hack was essentially the same as, or slightly higher, than traffic in the weeks before the news. Good news, right?

As it turns out, a few weeks' worth of web page views might actually provide a skewed picture. For one thing, the page views on Yahoo's properties could simply reflect users visiting Yahoo sites after learning about the hack so that they could figure out if they were affected, and try to secure, lock up or disable their accounts. 

Frantic visits and mail forwarding

The upper righthand chart of "Mail Messages Sent & Read" appears to show plenty of activty after the hack news. But it's possible that the burst of activity is actually a negative trend; a result of users frantically setting their Yahoo email accounts to automatically forward all of their messages to a different account, because they concluded that Yahoo's email service was no longer safe. 

In fact, Yahoo proceeded to disable the mail forwarding feature sometime during the week of October 3, in a controversial move that some suspected was an effort to prevent users from migrating to other mail services. After a public outcry, Yahoo re-activated the forwarding feature, claiming that it had been temporarily disrupted so that Yahoo could "upgrade" the platform. 

Look closely at the "Messages Sent & Received" chart though, and you'll notice the line indicating the volume of emails read or sent by Yahoo users climbs in the days immediately following September 22 and then suddenly flattens — right around the time when Yahoo disabled mail forwarding. 

Lack of info

Another chart shows an uptick in "Page Views on Core Verticals." But a look at the fine print in the footnotes to the chart says that "Core Verticals page view gains are primarily due to Sports seasonality." 

And Yahoo said nothing about how the overall number of user accounts were affected following the hack. 

"I’m skeptical that there’s no damage in terms of people retaining their accounts and continuing to use their accounts," says Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser. Without more information, it's hard to know for sure, Wieser acknowledges. Yahoo's characterization might be correct, "but I'd be surprised if there hasn't been any impact."

Wieser and other analysts could have asked for more details during the traditional conference call that Yahoo has every quarter. But that didn't happen.

Why? Yahoo decided not to have a conference call this quarter, citing the pending Verizon transaction.

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