Work in progress. Yahoo Chairman and CEO Terry Semel didn’t let a nasty cold get in the way of his message for today’s earnings call. Semel covered a lot of ground, emphasizing once again his core belief that the network with the strongest relationships with its users will “ultimately be the most powerful channel for advertisers.” From his opening comments:
– Yahoo is well on its way to a stated goal of at least 15 million paying relationships. Fees revenue was up 35 percent for the quarter as the number of fee relationships paying relationships rose to 12.6 million, up 1.2 million or 11 percent over the previous quarter, and 4.2 million or 50 percent over 4Q04. (Yahoo Music debuted in 2Q05 but it’s hard to draw conclusions about the actual number of music subs.)
– Yahoo will adjust its user stats starting this quarter to include Yahoo China and Yahoo Japan; providing, as Semel put it, “a user number that reflects Yahoo’s global reach” and “our consolidated financials.” That will bring Yahoo close to a half-billion uniques, up from 365 million at the close of 4Q05.
– The Yahoo Publisher Network, still in beta, expanded during the fourth quarter; “several thousand” publishers are taking part with thousands more on the waiting list. New features will be added to the beta in coming quarters.
The “c” word came up during Q&A — “When will we start seeing meaningful content additions to the site?” — triggering a mini-soliloquy from Semel on Yahoo’s content strategy, “the same strategy we’ve talked about in the past.” (For those listening to the audio, it comes about 50 minutes in.) He spoke of Yahoo’s three content buckets: licensed/aggregated; user-generated, created.
– “You’re seeing more and more user-generated content, as we talk, entering the platforms of Yahoo and we expect a lot more of that as we go forward.”
– I know he’s made most of this speech before but it sounded as though he was minimizing the role of internally produced entertainment content to some degree or, at least, trying to minimize some of the expectations prompted by the hiring of Lloyd Braun last year. He stressed that Yahoo has produced some of its content from the beginning. “You’re probably referring to entertainment stuff. … We will do a little of that and we will do that to help lead the way … to learn what our users are most interested in … and ultimately, really look for more and more outside companies to look to us as the partner of choice so we have the audience, we have the capabilities, we have the platforms and we have the desire, in effect, to help distribute, help introduce their products to vast audiences around the world.”
You can download the audio of the conference call here. (60 min., 10 Megs).
Streaming archived webcast.
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