The Motley Fool
Rick Aristotle Munarriz
July 30, 2009
I'm not seeing red this week. I'm only seeing purple.
Every week, I bash a company. I slam its valuation. I take a pile driver to its prospects. The crowd doesn't like it. I get booed for throwing a perfectly good publicly traded company to the mat. I guess that makes me the villain.
In the end, I'm not the evil masked grappler I get made out to be. I come right back, offering three stocks that should outperform the lightweight that I'm throwing around.
Who gets tossed out this week? Come on down, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO).
What is Yahoo! without paid search? Display advertising is a laggard. It's always been hard to monetize free e-mail, photo-sharing, and news. This doesn't mean that Yahoo! is a total flunky. Areas like Flickr, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Answers remain at the head of their respective classes.
The rub here is that it just got schooled, and by Microsoft of all pupils!
Etc
Good news
As I do every week, I don't talk down a stock unless I have three alternatives that I believe will outperform the company getting tossed. Let's go over three new fill-ins.
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Marchex (Nasdaq: MCHX) -- Advertisers paying more for leads, as a result of Yahoo! shutting down its self-serve platform, will benefit the Web's other lead generators. Marchex is one of my favorites. The local search specialist runs vertical advertising networks, the OpenList local search directory, and even a service that turns online leads into higher-converting phone calls. It also has an enviable portfolio of roughly 200,000 domain names, allowing it to generate its own organic traffic (instead of overpaying, as everyone else will).
Let's get ready to rumble. And tumble.
