SAN FRANCISCO — As Yahoo accepted the final bids for its core business on Monday, the internet company revealed just how badly that business was deteriorating.
Yahoo said that its revenue in the second quarter fell 15 percent, after excluding accounting adjustments, and its operating profit fell 64 percent.
Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr — its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer — was now worth only one-third of the $ 1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.
But investors were not focused on the quarterly numbers or Yahoo's vast overpayment for Tumblr. They were far more interested in whether Yahoo's web, email, news and other businesses will finally be sold — and at what price.
Ms. Mayer had little to say about the potential sale in a webcast with investors to discuss the results. She noted that the company had made "great progress" on the strategic review process but offered no timeline for a decision.
Yahoo has been conducting a prolonged auction for those assets since February, and final bids were due on Monday. Yahoo's board is expected to evaluate the offers over the next week or two and decide whether to proceed with a transaction that would end Yahoo's 20-year run as an independent, publicly traded company.
The bidders for Yahoo's operations include Verizon Communications and AT&T, several private equity firms and a Quicken Loans co-founder, Dan Gilbert, who is getting financial backing from Warren E. Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway. Verizon would probably merge Yahoo's internet business with AOL, another onetime online giant, which it owns.
Yahoo, the internet portal giant, has been struggling in the face of stiff competition. It is in the final stages of a lengthy bidding process for its core services of search, email, advertising and media operations.
If the board rejected all the offers, Yahoo would presumably go forward with a previous plan to spin off its operating businesses into a separate company, leaving its huge investments in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in the old company. That idea, announced in December, was widely panned by Yahoo investors, who have grown frustrated by the failure of Ms. Mayer's efforts to turn around the company since she was hired as chief executive four years ago.
Yahoo's flailing business will make it difficult to get top dollar for the company. According to the research firm eMarketer, Yahoo will get about 1.5 percent of the world's digital ad revenue this year, down from 2.1 percent last year. By comparison, Google is expected to command 30.9 percent of the market and Facebook is expected to garner 12 percent.
Analysts expect the final bids to come in at $ 3.5 billion to $ 6 billion, including Yahoo's land and patents.
The write-off of most of the value of the Tumblr blogging network is emblematic of the failure of Ms. Mayer's strategy to expand Yahoo by luring the mobile young users who drive the business of its chief rivals, Google and Facebook.
Ms. Mayer, who promised "not to screw it up" when she announced the purchase, never found a way to effectively sell ads on Tumblr, despite repeated changes in leadership and strategy. On Monday, she said that Yahoo had created new advertising inventory on Tumblr but marketers were not interested. "Our supply, because it's growing so quickly, is outpacing demand," she said.
Yahoo said it was writing off an additional $ 482 million of Tumblr's purchase price on top of the $ 230 million write-off it took in the first quarter.
In the second quarter, Yahoo's revenue was $ 1.31 billion, up from $ 1.24 billion in the same quarter a year ago. But the most recent quarter's revenue rose only because of a change in how Yahoo accounts for revenue from its search partnership with Microsoft. Excluding those changes, revenue fell 15 percent, and both search ads and display ads posted significant drops.
The company reported a net loss of $ 440 million, or 46 cents a share, for the quarter, compared with a loss $ 22 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Excluding the Tumblr write-off and other adjustments, the company's operating profit fell 64 percent.
Shares of Yahoo were down slightly in after-hours trading Monday evening.
Ms. Mayer noted that one bright spot for the industry, video advertising, was beginning to see price drops in the face of a glut of inventory as Facebook, Twitter and others churn out more live video and clips. "There's so much video, particularly mobile video, coming online that there is some price compression," she said.
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