Yahoo Finance could probably be monetized by shopping some sort of advanced feature to financial-software vendors. An Excel plugin would also be popular -- yes, it's nothing a VBA warrior couldn't code up in an afternoon, but a lot of people don't really want to do that. They could become Bloomberg for the masses, so to speak.

Pure email is not monetizable, but if they could tie in some unobtrusive freemium feature, there might be something in there. Remember that thread about commodity traders living on Yahoo IM? Surely some sort of IM/email mashup that could allow you to file and export messages could be popular.

I'm sure there more of value stored somewhere in the bully of Yahoo than just Finance, IM and email. I think there is money to be made like you suggest, but that's not the kind of company that Yahoo indicates that they want to be, sadly.

Yahoo will run it self into the ground trying to revive the glory days of Yahoo being the front page of Internet for millions of people. Management will not settle for a smaller service company, for a few niche markets.

Exactly, finance is the best thing they have and they already have the groundwork for creating a more general Bloomberg terminal.

They could have built an API to integrate broker/dealer systems and become a very nice plugin for equity trading. Or in reverse, they could offer you your existing brokerage right on the same page as the news.

Go social like InvestingNote. Track user models against the markets and host competitions.