Yahoo's Yang Looks Back on 'Amazing Ride'
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Cofounder reflects on company's first ten years at Web 2.0 Conference.
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Internet powerhouse Yahoo has given its popular Web site a facelift to highlight some of the features that the company has been improving during the past year.
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Just days after Yahoo! (YHOO ) launched the biggest makeover of its Web site in two years, one of its founders has said that&#39;s only the beginning.
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion -- but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That's a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when people were struggling to keep track of the new world of multimedia it offered them.In those days people viewed the Web through NCSA Mosaic, a browser that helped popularize the Web; they could check the level of coffee in the Trojan Room coffee machine at Cambridge University using the first Web cam on the Internet, and they could read the headlines on the NandO Times, one of the first "new media" operations.Yahoo first appeared on the Internet in 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still at Stanford University -- something that was immediately obvious from the site's first address: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/. It wasn't until later in 1994 that the easier-to-type http://www.yahoo.com came along, but even then it redirected to the Stanford server.But back in 1994 people weren't that concerned about clunky addresses. They'd been living with the text-based Internet for years and the Web with all of its richness had people hooked. Yahoo stepped in to solve an early problem: how could users keep track of the fast expanding World Wide Web.What Yang and Filo built was revolutionary for the time: a hierarchical index of the Web divided into subjects like "computers," "government" and "society and culture." (The service lives on today as the Yahoo Directory)Love at first sightFrom the early days it was clear that users loved Yahoo."David Filo and Jerry Yang should be given a Medal of Honor, then locked in a room and never allowed to get lives: they are already doing an excellent job of categorizing the Web with Yahoo's Hostlist," wrote one user in response to a Sept. 1994 Usenet posting asking for a directory of Web sites.Word of the service spread through the Internet, often from enthusiastic users passing on details of the resource, but sometimes with a little promotion by Yang and Filo themselves."We have a pretty comprehensive listing at the Yahoo Database," wrote Yang on Usenet in Sept. 1994. "It's an attempt to be organized by subject (although not very well) -- but we are working on it. Searchable too," he wrote.All the time Yang and Filo continued to live everyday lives, unaware they would become billionaires in less than a decade. A look at old Usenet postings reveals Yang campaigning for fair funding for college students while Filo was trying to trade World Cup tickets online.As 1995 began, Yahoo was serving up 200,000 pages per day from its index of about 25,000 Web sites, and was about to hit the big time. During that year Yang published a book about Yahoo and earned an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Both cofounders appeared on a PBS Frontline TV documentary about the Internet called "High Stakes in Cyberspace.""What Yahoo does is make your wasting your time easier. It wants you to get where you want to go to waste time faster so you don't have to waste time wasting time," is how Yang explained Yahoo in the documentary, according to a transcript of the show.The publicity came just as thousands of people started piling onto the Web and new sites were popping up faster and faster. As a result by the middle of June 1996 Yahoo had jumped to 9 million pages per day and in the third quarter of that year traffic for the three-month period hit 1 billion page views.Investment in the popular and fast growing site wasn't far behind its rising popularity. In April 1995 Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture funding just as Yang and Filo decided to put their studies on hold and start running Yahoo full time."We [hadn't] done anything on our research in the last few months," Filo told CIO magazine in a June 1995 interview. "We had to decide which thing to pursue, and we're not really interested in what our PhDs were in."An initial public offering and international expansion was next on the cards, and by the end of 1996 Yahoo had sites in the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan, and had launched the Yahooligans service for kids.Early competitionYahoo wasn't without competition back in those days. WebCrawler was getting popular and Lycos was also making a name for itself, but none of the search engines at the time fully satisfied people. So it was common to switch allegiances whenever a better service came along. In 1996 many Internet users did just that when sites like Inktomi and Digital Equipment's Altavista launched.But Yahoo managed to endure the competition, possibly because its directory often was a better place to find links that the early search engines.Microsoft was making a late start on the Internet, launching MSN as a dial-up Internet access service in the U.S. in 1995. It wasn't until a few years later that MSN was relaunched as a portal and still more years until Microsoft put its full weight behind developing Internet-based products and services.Like Yahoo, Google also grew out of Stanford University but didn't start to achieve recognition until the end of the decade. Within a few years, however, it had grown to become the leader in online search.Today Yahoo is one of the most powerful online media brands in the world. It has more than 500 million users in numerous countries and its name is recognizable to billions of people.
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Yahoo's better-than-expected third-quarter earnings has analysts feeling bullish about the old internet mainstay, and investors singing the praises of Jerry Yang, who returned to the company he founded in order to right the ship.
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As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that. We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first. BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.
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Yahoo Inc  Chief Executive  Jerry Yang on Monday highlighted his vision for reinvigorating  the pioneering Web company and solidifying Yahoo's role as the  essential starting point for Web users.
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang cited the growing online advertising market and his company&#39;s position to take advantage of that growth as reasons for shareholders to&#160;reject Microsoft&#39;s acquisition bid, he said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday.
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Yahoo Inc. is hoping a quirky take on the news will strike a chord as its next original programming effort.
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Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel ended his six-year stint as chief executive officer Monday and will hand over the reins to co-founder Jerry Yang in the Internet icon&#39;s latest attempt to regain investor confidence. Semel, 64, will remain chairmain in a non-executive role.
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Yahoo! has more questions than exclamation marks.
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After Jerry Yang and Sue Deckerâs conference call on Tuesday, Yahooâs shares plunged. Now, the companyâs customers and employees are left to wonder whatâs next.
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Yahoo's $350 million purchase shows commitment to communications services as  company rethinks its destiny, says exec.
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Chief Executive Jerry Yang told advertising executives that Yahoo can differentiate itself by acting as an "open" alternative to rivals such as Google and Microsoft
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang cited the growing online advertising market and his company&#39;s position to take advantage of that growth as reasons for shareholders to&#160;reject Microsoft&#39;s acquisition bid, he said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday.The letter, the contents of which Yahoo made public Wednesday, stated that&#160;Microsoft&#39;s February 1, $44.5 billion unsolicited takeover offer&#160;was too low. Yang said that Yahoo is the most visited site in the United States, held the top position in online display advertising, and counted almost one out of two of the world&#39;s Internet users as its members. He also said Yahoo is the top mobile destination in the U.S.Yang did not cite sources for most of his claims. However, comScore Networks research from November 2007 confirmed Yahoo&#39;s online display advertising leadership, with almost 19 percent of the market.The online ad market is expected to grow from $45 billion last year to $75 billion in 2010, Yang said, and that Yahoo wanted &quot;to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth -- and evolution -- of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.&quot;The company plans to grow visits to its properties &quot;by 15 percent per year over the next several years,&quot; although did not specify how. He also said that Yahoo&#39;s own search marketing system,&#160;Panama, along with two 2007 acquisitions -- Right Media and Blue Lithium -- would &quot;complement and enhance Yahoo!&#39;s existing capabilities and will make it easier for advertisers and online publishers to buy and sell advertising online.&quot;Both Yahoo and Microsoft have struggled to compete with Google&#39;s success in online advertising, specifically its paid search and Adwords programs. Based on the same comScore data, Microsoft captured only 6.7 percent of online display ads. That poor performance is seen as the main impetus behind its move for Yahoo.The letter made no mention of&#160;talks with News Corp.&#160;for some sort of share swap, intended either to offset Microsoft&#39;s interest or force the software company to boost its bid for Yahoo, as reported late Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal.
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Yahoo! gets into the game with its latest acquisition.
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Yahoo said it had penned an agreement with Current, the current events cable network pioneered by former presidential candidate Al Gore. The deal would bring some of the network's "viewer created content" to Yahoo's video service.