Is Lloyd Braun Out at Yahoo?

Rumors persist that Yahoo's mercurial media chief Lloyd Braun might soon be out of a job, despite glowing media profiles.  As Cnet reports:

Yahoo Media has lost ground to rivals in key areas and has yet to goose advertising sales with a runaway content hit, which many expected Braun to deliver when he arrived with fanfare in November, 2004.

But for all the headlines, reader traffic is the real currency in the online world, because marketers use those numbers to sell ads at higher rates. And that's where Braun has come up short.

At Yahoo Finance, one of the network's more important moneymakers, page views fell from more than 800 million in January 2005 to just a tick above 500 million in January of this year. That comes as a surprise to some Yahoo watchers because the company hired several financial columnists in October, including Ben Stein, to write original material for the site.

Yahoo Games, still the most popular gaming site in the category, lost 2 million unique visitors in the same January-to-January period and had 21 million unique visitors last month. Page views declined more dramatically--from about 1.3 billion to about 800 million, falling behind AOL Games and EA Online, according to ComScore.

Growth was slow at Yahoo News, despite original content additions and a major technology upgrade that included RSS support. Yahoo added features from TV war journalist Kevin Sites, The Huffington Post, Gawker Media and Richard Bangs, an "extreme travel" journalist. The number of Yahoo News visitors grew only 2 percent from January 2005 to last month.

And MSN Money is now bringing in more unique visitors than Yahoo Finance.  What's going on at Yahoo Hollywood?  I tried to catch Braun after he was on-stage at the EG conference, earlier this month, but he got into a heated argument with conference host Richard Saul Wurman about not being prepared and then left in a huff. 

So anyone out there know if the rumors are true?

[Update]: One Yahoo insider tells me Braun is still "very much in."  I say he has no more than a year to turn things around.

Comments

[Alan Brown]

Lloyd just hasn't been the same since his last encounter with Goerge Costanza.