Yahoo’s released Q2 financial results yesterday. The numbers, available in this PDF released by the company, were mixed:

• Overall, revenue was up 8%.
• Marketing revenue from it’s own properties was up 18%.
• Affiliate marketing revenues, however, were down 5%.

What does that mean? Basically… Yahoo! is making more money from the sites that it owns… but less money from marketing on sites outside the Yahoo! network. That’s never a good sign for a company with a large financial stake in affiliate sales.

• Operating income was down 19%
• Cash flow was down 6%
• Net income was 11 cents per share

Yahoo!’s 11 cents/share net income was in line with what Wall Street was expecting. In future-looking statements, Yahoo! made the rest of the year look, as ZDNet put it, “light”.

What’s more, newly-named CEO and company co-founder Jerry Yang told conference call attendees that he planned to spend the next “100 days or so” rebuilding a strategic plan for the company:

Looking ahead, we want to dramatically improve our performance and capture the major growth opportunities we see ahead for the Internet. I intend to spend the next 100 days or so focused on mapping out a strategic plan for the long-term success, working with our teams to put the right organization and the right people in place, and making any necessary changes. We are well on our way with a top to bottom review of our business in order to effectively address the company’s challenges and capitalize on our many great opportunities.

The affects of this review of the company can already been seen. Several long-standing - but poor-performing - Yahoo! properties have been shut down in the past weeks. The choice to shut these properties down was probably made well before Yang’s ascension to the Yahoo! thrown. But I think that just goes to show that the company shake-up was well underway before he came onto the scene.

100 days (approx 3 months) is a substantial amount of time, especially for a company that continues to loose share in key markets with each passing month. But I can’t say I’m surprised. One of Yahoo!’s key weaknesses these days is its inability to act quickly. The company has become a huge, bloated, inefficient, bureaucracy. If Jerry Yang wants to make some changes to the way things work in Sunnyvale, he’d be wise to streamline the crud out of that place as a good first step.

More discussion at Techmeme | Full transcript of the conference call at Seeking Alpha