Stefan Mileschin

The reason why Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer's fired Chief Operating Officer Henrique de Castro last month have become abundantly clear in its fourth quarter results.

Yesterday she had to announce that Yahoo's overall revenue fell six percent in the last three months of the year to $1.266 billion, marking four consecutive quarters of eroding revenue. The company said that prices for both online display ads and search ads declined in the fourth quarter.

Yahoo online ad prices slid again in the fourth quarter and Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant in which it owns a big stake, saw revenue growth decelerate.

Yahoo's shares were down 3.7 percent at $36.82. What is bad for Yahoo is that the figures should have been for its best quarter which means that its core business is shrinking.

Mayer has been aggressively to trying to improve the company with product makeovers, acquisitions and big media hires. But the ad sales business continues to struggle at a time when rivals such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are posting strong revenue growth.

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