Yahoo's big news to Wall Street, in its Q4 earnings, was the announcement that it is cutting 15% of its workforce; and looking to reduce costs by USD$400m (£277.6m) by the end of the year. Its Q4 results were in line with Wall Street analysts' expectations. The company posted fourth-quarter earnings of USD$1.27bn (£881.5m) in revenue; but reported a full year loss of USD$4.44bn (£3.05bn) due to a goodwill impairment – mostly coming from the write-down of the lame duck social media site, Tumblr.

Financial Highlights

– Revenue for Q4 was USD$1.273bn (£883.6m), up 1.5% year-over-year
– Display revenue was USD$601m (£417.2m) for the fourth quarter of 2015, a 13% increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2014
– Search revenue was USD$522m (£362.3m) for the fourth quarter of 2015, an increase of 12%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2014.

To spin-off or not to spin-off

I am sure the phrase 'spin-off'' was the most used in post-analysis of the Yahoo quarter. Yahoo announced that it would proceed with plans to separate its core Yahoo business and investment holdings in both Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. Some think this might be a precursor to a sale of Yahoo's core business, with a number of suitors looking at the opportunity.

But what is the opportunity? Its core content sites and email business attracts more than 800 million global uniques per month; and it still has a fairly lucrative search business.

Yahoo is also a significant player in ad tech, making a number of interesting acquisitions over the past two years – including Flurry and BrightRoll.

Time will tell if a large strategic buyer will come in and acquire Yahoo. The telcos are in the market for new revenue drivers for their declining core business; and Yahoo would be an interesting buy for anyone looking for a media and tech execution layer.

Is Mayer looking for a buyer?

Mayer appears to want to persist with her turnaround plans instead of an outright sale. The trouble is, it all looks a little confused. Mavens [mobile, video, native, and social] has not been the breakout success that investors had hoped for – and it is not clear how much more time she will be given.

Although Mayer alluded to some programmatic strategy during the call, Yahoo needs to be more vocal about its product offering - given that the display channel (still Yahoo's core business) is becoming automated.

With nearly USD$15-20bn (£10.4-13.9bn) of Google's revenue coming from programmatic, Yahoo still seems to struggle to provide a clear picture on its offering to the ad market.

Is this something she should be considering as a key strategy in a downsized Yahoo? If she did put content and email at Yahoo's core, Mayer could automate a lot of the sales process with its own ad tech – or even outsource some of it to reduce tech costs. It would definitely hit top line revenue growth, but net profit would increase in a more streamlined 'programmatic' Yahoo.

Yahoo still has strategic value, but it is unclear whether that is as an independent player, or part of bigger entity. The first half of this year will likely give us a clearer picture.