failure. “Irving said there are internal goals that the company will use to measure its success, but he declined to share them with reporters,” says VentureBeat.

Those goals, we’ve heard from a source close to Yahoo: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.

Doable? Not a chance. Well, maybe on the user number. They grew 9% over the last year in unique users according to Comscore. If they keep that up they’ll be at around 800 million, and I guess they could buy their way to a billion buy buying WordPress, Glam and/or Myspace, each with about 165 million unique monthly visitors. But short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen.

The revenue target is even less likely. 2008 revenue was $7.2 billion, dipping down to $6.5 billion last year. 2010 looks flat v. 2009 so far.

So this is a bit of a stretch goal. Which is still a goal and is a great target. But what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision beyond what they showed today. Irving certainly has his work cut out for him.

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Authors: Michael Arrington

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