
Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel and CFO Susan Decker presented today at Goldman Sachs’ Internet conference, and had some interesting points on how Yahoo fits into the broadband world, both from the access side and from original content perspective. I’m glad he’s humble about his company’s position in this changing world, but the company will have to be more aggressive than that, in my opinion, and that doesn’t mean just putting on rich-media ads online. (I’ve paraphrased a lot in this)
Anyway, GS analyst Anthony Noto introduced the company as: “Yahoo is like a cable network on steroids…”
Semel on how various verticals define his company: Verticals are not walled gardens for us..it is all a network for us…how we start to integrate what you do where you are, instead of you going to different sections?…Yahoo is a network, and many large advertisers want to buy across a network. The potential to grow is by getting advertisers to grow across the networks.
On broadband: from the access side deals with SBC in U.S. and BT in U.K. (paraphrasing): clearly access deals have a good financial effect for us. Co-branded deals like this grow the Yahoo user base, it gives us access to a lot of people with direct billing relationships with their access providers. You should look for us to be at the forefront of this.
Getting into original content: Susan Decker, CFO: Part of it is to find out what content means: a lot of content most popular is user generated. It is e-mail and IM…we’re in content areas which makes most sense.
Semel: We never really moved away from broadband content but until you grow a big enough broadband audience, and until they use it daily, it won’t explode. My experience is that we should think about is like cable channel…firstly, people went to cable because it has more channels and better reception. With broadband, the most important thing for them initially is better speed. When we launched Yahoo Platinum, we kept looking at research, and we said it was early days. We confirmed our own research
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