The NYTimes posits that any potential buyers for Yahoo will wait for early returns on Project Panama first.

Students of Yahoo say that while the company may be acquired, no deal is likely before Project Panama begins to show results, one way or another. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise Yahoo’s revenue $250 million to $500 million in 2008 — and warned that investors could be “too late” if they waited to buy until Panama’s rollout risks had passed. [Link added by me for those unfamiliar with Project Panama]

It was a bold statement for a number of reasons:

So, someone may acquire Yahoo? Who?

• I can’t picture an Old Media making the Time Warner/AOL mistake again. While Old Media companies writhe in their inability to establish themselves online, buying an expensive company isn’t the solution. People are the solution, and Yahoo’s key managers are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.
• How about Microsoft? The corporate culture and stance on open collaboration with other services are very different. There significant compatibility issues. But who else can afford the 36.6 billion dollar market cap today?
• How about the carriers like Comcast or AT&T. This sounds far more likely to me as it would allow a carrier to be the consumer-facing brand on both the data lines and the services the leverage the lines. It would also be a way to kick the “net neutrality” debate in favor of the carriers by not only silencing a major proponent of “net neutrality,” but even going so far as turning that proponent into an evangelist for the carriers. But, the carriers are currently sitting pretty as a platform that everyone has to pay to participate on… why ruin that nice position and get involved in content? It’s certainly not within their domain of expertise.

Also, why would an acquirer wait until after Project Panama is released? Yahoo’s biggest problem right now is their inability to monetize their traffic. Any acquirer would be making a significant bet that they can do a better job at monetizing traffic than Yahoo can.

So, why wait until Project Panama succeeds or fails? If it succeeds, then you lose out on today’s bargain price. If it fails, you just wasted a year watching Yahoo fail when the potential acquirer could have been spending that time implementing their own monetization strategy. It seems to me that if Yahoo is going to be acquired it will be sooner rather than later.

Fred’s got some great traffic visuals on Yahoo to further prove my point. Traffic growth on Yahoo has reduced to single digit percentages year-over-year. Yahoo has reached maturity in growth. Any acquisition is going to be an acquisition of eyeballs as Yahoo’s profit wanes, and traffic is at a plateau, so acquire now while the stock is a bargain (unless you think it can go lower than the 52-week low its barely floating above right now… that’s pretty damn low).