Yahoo is considering selling off its core internet business

Yahoo's board of directors is meeting Wednesday through Friday to determine the company's fate, and the options include halting the proposed sale of Yahoo's lucrative stake in Chinese internet juggernaut Alibaba and selling off Yahoo's core internet properties, sources tell The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News are, taken together, the No. 3 most visited site on the internet, after Google and Facebook, but they represent a fraction of Yahoo's $31 billion market capitalization, perhaps less than zero.

Yahoo is one of the original internet giants, but it lost its footing and, apparently, its sense of direction in the mid-2000s. CEO Marissa Mayer was brought in from Google four years ago to turn around the company, but while she has stopped Yahoo's spiraling decline, she hasn't done much to reverse its fortunes. Most of Yahoo's value is from its 15 percent stake in Alibaba, worth $32 billion, and its 35 percent share of Yahoo Japan, worth $8.5 billion. Still, Yahoo's 210 monthly visitors are worth something, and private equity and tech firms are said to be interested in buying the venerable web properties. In October, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Youssef Squali valued Yahoo's core businesses at $3.9 billion.

"The saving grace for Yahoo is that it still has a relatively large user base that is reliant on the platform so long as they maintain email addresses there. It also has a still relatively strong (and still relatively large) sales force," Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser wrote to his clients Tuesday night. “As long as both of those factors remain in place, there would be time for an acquirer to establish new strategies and develop products while the property continues to generate cash flow."