Yang: Yahoo! getting personal
But the message of his keynote address at Jupiter Communications' annual Consumer Online Forum here seemed to be that Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) has more pressing matters to attend to -- such as integrating the community and e-commerce possibilities of such recent acquisitions as GeoCities, Yoyodyne and Viaweb into the rest of the service.
"People ask me, 'How are you going to keep people from just bypassing you and going directly to your partners?' " Yang said. "The answer is ... we will be bypassed if we stop adding value for the customer. That is a very difficult challenge."
He dismissed the notion that Yahoo! is focused on "stickiness," or finding ways of keeping users on the site longer, so that they see more advertising.
Rather, Yang said, Yahoo! is always looking for "ways to remove the barriers to getting things done."
And what users want to do, increasingly, is shop and interact with other users, Yang said.
Forging new services
Yahoo! plans to continue forging partnerships and new services to give users a "personalizable and comprehensive shopping experience," but will also deploy commerce tools to its community users via subsidiaries GeoCities and Viaweb.
Softbank, the majority shareholder of ZDNN's publisher, Ziff-Davis Inc. (NYSE:ZD), is an investor in Yahoo!
"Once you bring those tools down to the granular level, so that everybody can use them, and not just Yahoo! employees, you bring tremendous power to the people," Yang said.
For example, users on GeoCities can already configure their Web pages for online selling, for a flat monthly fee. Yang said that Viaweb, now Yahoo! Store, provides all the tools and services necessary to build an e-commerce site, also charging a flat fee.
Another long-term goal for Yahoo! is to improve its one-to-one marketing, a concept that has so far mostly failed to materialize.
Unlike e-commerce sites, portals such as Yahoo! and Excite (Nasdaq:XCIT) do not necessarily have accurate demographic data about their users.
'Permission marketing'
One way of solving that problem is through "permission marketing," where users exchange some personal information for a value-added service of some kind, such as a contest or for frequent-flyer points.
Yahoo! acquired Yoyodyne Entertainment, a specialist in permission marketing, last October.
"One of the things I've learned from Yoyodyne is ... to build a relationship, it's critical to do it over time," Yang said. "We hope we have developed a level of trust and ease that only time can buy."
Another concern is whether successful niche competitors, such as online auction companies, will eventually eat away at Yahoo!'s core business.
Yang said that while Yahoo! Auctions lags behind online auction giant eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY), he believes Yahoo! can hold its own in second or third place in the niche.
"We can get our own critical mass, independent of eBay," Yang said. "We've done it with e-mail and instant messaging already. We can be in the No. 2 spot or whatever, as long as it's sustainable."