Yes, they were. Collecting revenue != common wisdom holds that their business model is a good idea. I recall that even at the IPO, there was widespread surprise that Google had been profitable since 2001, as most people had assumed they must be losing money.
There are wide information disparities and a long time lag between something becoming actually true and when it enters common wisdom. Heck, I can think of a couple cryptocurrency companies that made over a billion dollars in revenue (revenue, not valuation) last year and yet a good portion of the planet still thinks crypto is a fad or pyramid scheme.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing