Yahoo triples profit on healthy ad sales

SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo Inc beat Wall Street's profit and sales expectations as spending by advertisers showed signs of life in the third quarter and as months of cost-cutting and restructuring boosted the Internet company's bottom line.

Shares of Yahoo, the top US seller of online display ads but a distant No 2 to Google Inc in search, jumped 5 percent after the results, which analysts said boded well for the fourth quarter, when ad spending should improve further.

Yahoo's revenue from display advertising was much better than expected, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler, citing the 2 percent sequential increase in US display ad sales.