• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 9, 2015

With an average of 210 million users visiting and searching Yahoo's network monthly, the company has not been able to figure out how to translate its site visitors into revenue. On a call with investors and analysts Wednesday, the company laid plans for a reverse direction.

While Yahoo has suspended work on the spinoff of its stake in Alibaba, it has turned a focus on a reverse spin off to separate Yahoo and the Alibaba stake into two separate public companies. Company officials hope the reverse spinoff would make the value of Yahoo's Web businesses more apparent to investors and easier to sell.

Apparently, Yahoo's data is in play, according to some. "Yahoo's evolution as a media company means a number of media and telecom firms are in play for all or part of the business," says Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, and a veteran telecom industry expert. "It all boils down to data possession here -- the companies are anxious to get their hands on Yahoo's data in order to present a better competitive face to Google and Facebook, and tap into market interest."

While Verizon CFO Fran Shammo's comments on Monday at an industry conference were the first official hint of interest from a company that analysts say could be among Yahoo's potential buyers, others like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft could also benefit from the data.

eMarketer estimates Yahoo's U.S. revenue from search at $1.271 billion in 2015, rising slightly to $1.297 billion in 2016. U.S. display revenue should come in at around $1.259 billion in 2015, rising slightly to 1.297 billion in 2016.

Yahoo’s share of search referrals in the U.S. fell from 7.6% in July 2012, when Marissa Mayer was appointed president and CEO, to 7.4% in November 2014, according to StatCounter. The analysis comes following Yahoo’s announcement Wednesday of a reverse spin off plan.

Yahoo’s U.S. share fell by 2.6% since July 2012. on all platforms including desktop, mobile, tablet and console. Yahoo peaked in the U.S. at 10.2% in January 2015, after Mozilla made it the default search engine for Firefox 34 users, per StatCounter’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats.