Of course having a good dividend AND capital growth would be desirable but shareholders won't complain too loud about a company that just spits out dividends year after year.
Every time you use the word "growth" to describe "success", you will find that you only have new mouths to feed.
Yahoo announced falling revenues and a quarterly loss of $99.2m on Tuesday - from April 19, 2016
[0] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1011006/0001193125164...
Then how could it bend the facts to meet their bias?
But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on.
There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as their default homepage ten years ago.
You can hear the fail in their words. They're talking about retaining users, not offering value. They still want to be a portal (ie the base of every action you take), something users didn't want when it was new.
That's the business legacy you'd have to reverse before you stop producing negative-value, let alone actually produce something that may actually be valuable.
My understanding is that's the one thing that is not up for sale these days, and that all relevant discussions are regarding the spinoff of their core web businesses.
I don't know if tumblr is profitable, but it has many users.
edit: whoops this was already mentioned a number of times in other comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups#Site_statistics
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-burrus/yahoo-groups_b_1...
I fail to believe that Yahoo, minus Ali Baba and Fantasy sports and similar bits, is actively NEGATIVE value. It might be poorly run and have the poor actions you're talking about. (okay, it DOES have the negatives you mention).
That doesn't mean what's there "should just die" - it's a business opportunity to take that and use it profitably.
From a business perspective (he says having no business experience or expertise), Yahoo is a collection of assets: Code, people, branding, community. They aren't in first place, and they aren't profitable at the moment, but I think the case that they have zero or negative value is a bit simplistic.
Put it another way: Would you rather throw a pile of money at trying to build a collection of code, talent, business contracts, and users from scratch, or would you rather buy an EXISTING collection, on the cheap, and work instead to flip it into a profitable business? Both are risky ventures, but everything I've seen says it's harder to build from scratch than it is to keep existing users.
Perhaps your answer is that you'd prefer to build it from scratch, but do you see why - if the answer takes some thought to determine - that someone else might come to a different conclusion?
Heck, even if you want to completely toss the business model - even if you want to toss everything they've done and what they are trying to do - I'd imagine the servers, in-house expertise, and collected code and utilities, not to mention any purchased or licensed software, would make Yahoo worth considering as an acquisition.