As the latest chief executive at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer becomes the steward of two precious and interrelated resources: a big audience and a big pile of cash. To protect the former she will have to spend the latter – and a lot of it.

The disorder at the top of Yahoo and its failure to launch groundbreaking products make the company easy to dismiss as a basketcase. But about 700m users visit Yahoo sites each month, according to ComScore. They visit, on average, for more than two hours each. And these numbers are stable. This is why Yahoo’s revenue last year, at $4.2bn, was only slightly lower than they were five years before. And the business generates good cash flow – about $800m a year. This on top of $2.5bn in net cash already on the balance sheet.

Given how stable the business has been, its low valuation, the cash it holds and its poor record of developing new products, it is also easy to conclude that the company should be run for cash. This would be a mistake. It may make sense to return cash from the divestiture of the company’s Asian assets to shareholders. But a half decade of stable revenues does not mean that the rules of the consumer internet do not apply to Yahoo’s core business.