Terry (Yahoo!’s head honcho) just got done being interviewed by Jon Battelle at Web 2.0. I took rough notes which I’ll dump here unedited for now.
Update: Danny at Search Engine Watch quoted my transcript liberally (thanks Danny!) but questions whether we’re really "more open". Not sure what he has in mind on the Google side besides their aforementioned maps API thing and their very limited search API, but if you’re looking for a good summary of what we’re doing, it’s easy to find: see here and here.
We’re not a complete superset of what they do yet, but I’d say it’s hard to argue that they do as much or more.
of Q: It’s been four years since you’ve taken over Y!. Some people thought you were nuts to do it. Why’d you do it?
A: I’d spent about a year investing in internet companies. I saw enormous possibilities. I always thought that the advertising business had not yet begun and there was enormous opportunities to monetize. The perfect time to invest in a company is after [a dip].
Q: When you were approached, did you jump in or did you think ‘what does an old hollywood hand know about the internet’?
A: This old hollywood hand was looking for a new career. I saw the internet as what it is today, the next wave, as a place where people around the world would spend a lot of their time. But when Jerry Yang asked if I was interested in this, I said absolutely not. But I went home and said this is perfect. Great brand great people, adn a great time to take it to the next level.
Q: Speaking of articles, back inthe spring you made a move .. media division in Santa Monica. Was this the coming out of a media strategy? People are asking "Is Terry Semel trying to turn Y! into an interactive studio of the future?"
A: In the 20th cnetury it was all about content and distribution. Technology had little part in this. Y! and the internet in the 21st century, technology and media go hand in hand; you can’t have one without the other. Yahoo has always had distribution — nearly 400M users around the world. Content has always been what Y is all about. I see us as a 21st century tech company that drives media. I don’t think you can have one without the other.
Q: The mainstream media is a little scared about Y moving into "their space". you recently hired a high-profile journalist. How do you respond to their concerns or do you care?
A: I do care, because wherever you go it’s all content. I see three ways of us generating content going forward. One is user-generated content, community, 360, providing templates and tools and themes to enable people whether they’re using Flickr, or 360 or Local. OTOH, what we’ve always done is to license, aggregate, adn work with partners. Third, to help design the future of what content should be on the internet, to lay the groundwork for this broadband world and connected world with things like IPTV. We want companies to look to Y as a distribution platform.
Q: Yesterday we asked Barry Diller whether he’ll compete on content.
A: I would imagine the content that he’s talking about will relate to more of the vertical businesses he’s in such as travel. We will compete in travel but we will provide user generated content. We’re prefer to post people’s blogs about their trips. Do I wnat to share it with my buddies, do I want to share it with anybody, do I want to add advertising to it?
Q: A friend asked me last week ‘what is yahoo’ becuase there’s so many things you’re involved with he’s not sure. Recently Y was called out on a particular issue wrt journalism in china but had to turn over information to a chinese government which led to the jailing of a journalist. news orgs say that they’d never do this.
A: I think that 99%-100% of what we do in news is to aggregate other peoples’ news, so if you want to know what happened in iraq yesterday, you can view that through any country in the world and participate any way you want. we saw the kevin sites experience, if you watched it on TV it’d be dateline or CNN. don’t try to judge any one product. we’re creating a whole new experience … I don’t think there’s a publication in the world who does business in china that can’t obey the laws of china. most of those publications are still in china. i wouldn’t confine it to china per se. there are many countries with laws like that around the world. when you’re operating around the world, you face the following issue: it’s both a moral issue and a legal issue. the people and the companies who live in those countries know those laws. sometimes on a personal level I wince, but those laws are stated, they’re not secret.
If we told governments to stick it, we’d all be banned.
Q: What do you make of Google’s strategy?
A: I think Google have clearly done a very good job in search. I think that probably the difference would be that they were the pioneers. We’re now full speed ahead, been in search less than two years, others are coming in, and I think that’s healthy. I think that when you have one company doing anything, it’s [bad]. It must to have occurred to them at some poitn that 5% of the pageviews are relevant to search. but what search doesn’t able them to have were some of the pillars of yahoo [community, personalization, content]. To accomplish that, we need communications products. we need things like shopping or news or orkut. we need other things. where we sit, it seems like a portal. so why don’t we rate it as a portal? as a portal, it would probably be rated #4. news is quite small compared to yahoo and MSN. photos is very small. shopping is very small. mail: good product, but i’d guess i’d go with the WSJ from a few weeks ago and say that yahoo mail is better. so far what they’ve done is moving to get into some of the major portal activities, not tie those together, many have remained in beta, and not tied together.
Q: [Google may enter the jobs space] You’ve got hotjobs. From the historic approach that goog takes is scrape and aggregate as opposed to own. Will you give a feed to google?
A: We’ll always be more open than they are. [applause from audience] we began with RSS. yahoo in general sees ourselves as an open platform with the ability to publish on yahoo. we think the big change is not to get more and more unique users. as we go forward now, it’s about deeper engagement. more time spent. more satisfactory experiences for users and advertisers. all of our personalization, community, content, is starting to be on platform so when you integrate those things, it’s a much richer experience than using 5% of your pageviews doing search. this is a marathon, this is not a sprint.
Q: (from audience) I agree that if goog were a portal they’d be #4.
A: good man. do you work for yahoo?
Q: no, msn. [laughter] What do you think y’s biggest strength and what is goog’s biggest weakness.
A: we have a much more diversified model. if we only focus ourselves on [search] and allow the stock markets to focus on that, that’s fine. is that the only growth aspect and way to make deeper engagement? absolutly not.
Q: you talked before about user-generated content how important is it as a priority for you at yahoo. in five years do you think yo’ll be making more money from user generated content
A: it is of utmost importance…content in general is going to get more important. they will all demand more and take greater advantage of the internet. i don’t think that old media is how ppeople are going to use the internet. i think that it demands new paradigms. 2-3 years ago people said ‘terry, branded ads or sponsored search ads, which will be more important’ i have two children and they’re both geniuses and they’re both in their childhood. why should i have to decide? why can’t we have both?
Related posts:
Jeffrey-
Even though you a traitorous fiend, I do enjoy your blog. Open question – how much of Yahoo’s current success was really part of Terry’s ’strategy’ 2-3 years ago?
I’m not in the best position to judge since I haven’t been here very long, I think he deserves a lot of credit. He’s a deal-making kind of dude and you could argue that the way that Y! has been re-invented over the past few years stems from our ability to do deals. That said I think that the kinds of things that Terry is bringing us toward (media hub, more deals with content providers) aren’t all in place yet — we’re only at the tip of the iceberg today.
Jeffrey, on the API side, I can’t say. I’m not a programmer and haven’t tried to put the APIs side-by-side in terms of what they offer on the functionality front. But Google’s had a web search API longer than Yahoo. Google’s launched in 2002. Yahoo’s came out in Feb. 2005. If APIs are being open, the Google’s been open a lot longer than Yahoo. Of course, Yahoo’s Overture had a paid search API since 2001, before the Google paid search/AdWords API that came out this year.
Google also offers a deskbar API, and there might be more. But I’d bet Yahoo outnumbers Google. Yahoo keeps rolling them out, an API just recently not just for shopping search but shopping search user reviews!
It would be interesting to see all the APIs put side-by-side and some assessment of whether someone is more open with APIs or not. I couldn’t do that type of assessment, but perhaps you could issue it as a challenge to developers. Overall, my impression has been both companies are doing much in the space.
If openness is in terms of offering feeds, I guess I haven’t seen Yahoo offering feeds of its web content as somehow being more open.
You’re already publishing that content on the web. Feeds are just a way of helping me get to it/you more easily. I’ve long been able to get email alerts to new additions to the Yahoo Directory. Now that I can get the same via RSS, that’s somehow more open?
It’s convenient, a great feature, but it’s ultimately just driving me back to Yahoo. After all, flipping through some of the feeds, none seem to be full text. They’re essentially alerts to come back and view stuff on Yahoo.
Google can definitely do a lot more in offering feeds to grab appropriate content. Yahoo understands the value of RSS well, and Google needs to play catch-up here. But it still doesn’t seem to be about openness but rather driving traffic to the respective sites.
It’s a different thing if we’re talking taking a feed and doing mashups and fun stuff with APIs. If Yahoo is literally letting people take content in depth and play with it as they’d like, I guess that would fall much more in what I’d see as open. But that comes back to that API assessment.
What I had in mind on the Google side was what I covered in my write-up, the issue of gathering content and openness. Google has said they want all the content they can get, all of it — which goes to the question John raised about whether Yahoo would give Google content. Terry said yes, plus we know Yahoo says it wants all the content it can get.
From your submit page,
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
“The goal of Yahoo! Search is to discover and index all of the content available on the web to provide the best possible search experience to users.”
But Yahoo’s had a history of also telling publishers it wants to be paid to take that content and has held out the unspoken threat that if they don’t pay, they don’t play. This is what you said in 2004:
“Eliminate guesswork: Ensure that your pages are reviewed and included in the search index quickly and refreshed frequently. No waiting for search engines to find your site or guessing which content will be included.”
I did a reread of the pages today and Yahoo does seem to have finally dropped that threat part, which is great.
This page
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse.php
For example, doesn’t suggest Yahoo may or may not guess right over what to crawl. It focuses more on the freshness side:
“If you have content that has just changed or is updated frequently (such as pricing information or product items), Search Submit Express ensures the most up-to-date content is available to search users by refreshing your URLs every 48 hours.”
Of course, the suggestion here is that if you have content that changes often and don’t pay, Yahoo will have stale listings for you. That obviously goes against Terry’s statement of wanting to have a satisfactory experience for users. If you’re doing the best for your users, you’re refreshing content as often as it should be refreshed, not as often as you are paid to do so.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not against paid solutions for site owners. Many want them, and it would be great if Google added some. That’s actually openness, as well. I’ve spent a great deal of time explaining the pros and cons of the tricky issue of paid inclusion, as well as paid support programs, as the web search team at Yahoo will tell you. But paid inclusion at Yahoo is ultimately tied to a pay-per-click fee that continues to leave it lurking that some content won’t get in, if people won’t pay. And that just doesn’t ring well when the CEO of the company starts saying Yahoo will always be more open than Google.
If Yahoo dropped the pay-per-click component, it would only bring the company a world of good (and cost you practically nothing in revenues to lose). For all we know, Yahoo may be more open in that it’s actually getting more content naturally than Google. But we don’t even get to that point when we’re first stopped by having to examine Yahoo’s paid inclusion program.
Openness can be measured in other ways. As I said in my piece, it might be that many in that the Web 2.0 audience might have been heavy with those companies that have wanted to work with Google and been turned away. Google doesn’t seem to be very open about wanting to partner with others, if it can do it itself.
On the PR side, many find Google to be extremely closed. Yes, I think Yahoo has done more with outreach on that front. Then again, I can remember how for years, I couldn’t get anyone from Yahoo to come out and speak at our conferences. It wasn’t important enough then. Google always came. Google, of course, was a small service looking to grow. When Yahoo realized it was losing marketshare and advertisers, suddenly it started turning out around 2001/2 and now always comes out in force, just as Google does.
Overall, I hope that helps explain a bit more on why I said I’ve seen both companies open and closed in various aspects and especially over time. Is Yahoo more open than Google today? I honesly don’t know. In some aspects, yes, in others, no. It’s a bold statement by Terry to say Yahoo will always be more open when in at least one area, that of paid inclusion, Yahoo definitely is not. Since I know that particular area so well, that’s the area I wanted to explore more. Like I said, I’d love to see someone look at the APIs and see if Yahoo’s more open in that aspect.
By the way, I did try to keep the quotes from your transcript as limited as possible, to only want seemed really necessary to build on the points I wanted to explore. I hope you didn’t think it was really too liberal, but if so, I can trim them down even more. Just let me know.
Not at all, Danny, you’re welcome to the quotes, that’s why I posted them. Thanks for stopping by and thanks for the great post.