Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo!, and his board of directors may have been re-elected by shareholders at Friday's annual meeting, but he disappointed Wall Street by offering few new ideas to help to revive the internet company's sickly share price.

The Yahoo! co-founder promised to stick to previously disclosed initiatives to bolster the business model and extract value from Yahoo!'s assets, which he called “truly extraordinary”.

Yahoo! is under pressure to prove that it can halt declining profits, compete more effectively with Google and, above all, return the share price to more than $33 - the price offered by Microsoft three months ago.

Although Mr Yang indicated that he believed that the company was capable of increasing the number of Yahoo! users from about 500 million to 1.5 billion in 2010, there was no new deal or tie-up unveiled at the meeting.

Doubts remain about the Yahoo!- Google advertising deal, which was unveiled as part of Yahoo!'s defence against Microsoft, with regulators still to decide whether the joint venture would constitute a monopoly.

Mr Yang insisted that, without the distraction of the Microsoft talks, he could concentrate on transforming Yahoo! into the most popular “starting point” on the web and developing a new advertising system.

Speaking after the meeting, Mark Nelson, co-founder of Mithras Capital which owns about 1.7 million Yahoo! shares, said: “They don't understand the realities of their business.

"My belief is that if, within a month or two, there isn't something transforming in the works, the major shareholders will put enough pressure on the company that [Mr Yang] will be forced out.”

Analysts at Deutsche Bank have given up on Mr Yang. They believe that operating profits will fall by a third in 2008 and that much of the business remains “precarious”, but they are advising clients to hold on to the shares in the hope that Carl Icahn, the activist investor who has joined the board, will force through a deal with Microsoft.

Yahoo! shares closed at $19.80 on Friday in New York.

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