Posts filed under 'Yahoo!'
Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
“Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo!. “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”
“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” said Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, Google. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”
The OpenSocial Foundation website at www.opensocial.org will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.
Engineers from Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google will continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation, continuing several core elements of OpenSocial since its announcement by Google, MySpace, and many others in November 2007:
- all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
- public community involvement shapes the specification’s direction
- an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/
About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.
Steady Evolution, Important Milestones
Millions of people around the world are beginning to see the benefits of the OpenSocial platform as new features appear on their favorite social networks. MySpace launched the MySpace Developer Platform, which uses the OpenSocial APIs, and began rolling out applications to its users. orkut has also started making OpenSocial applications available to its users, and hi5 will do so at the end of March.
Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.
Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.
March 26th, 2008
Yahoo! today filed an investor presentation that details the Company’s three-year financial plan and strategic initiatives which are expected to roughly double operating cash flow over the next three years from $1.9 billion to $3.7 billion and generate $8.8 billion in revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (revenue ex-TAC) in 2010.
The financial plan was first presented to Yahoo!’s board of directors in December 2007, before the Company received the unsolicited acquisition proposal by Microsoft Corporation.
The presentation supports the unanimous determination by the Company’s board of directors that Microsoft’s January 31, 2008 unsolicited acquisition proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!. The board cited Yahoo!’s global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as its substantial unconsolidated investments, as factors in its decision. Yahoo!’s board of directors is continuing to evaluate all of its strategic alternatives to maximize value for Yahoo! stockholders.
Yahoo!’s management today also reaffirmed its outlook for the first quarter 2008 and full year 2008, as previously provided on January 29, 2008.
Key sources of projected growth in revenue and operating cash flow cited in the presentation include $1.9 billion in added revenue ex-TAC over the next three years from display/video advertising, as Yahoo! expects its growth to outpace the currently anticipated market rate of growth in online display/video advertising. The Company also expects $1.4 billion in added search revenue, implying growth essentially in line with the anticipated market rate of growth in search advertising.
“Yahoo! is positioned for accelerated financial growth - we have a powerful consumer brand, a huge global audience and a highly profitable operating model,” said Jerry Yang, the Company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “With industry-leading tools, technology, people and platforms, Yahoo! is poised to capture growth in display advertising where we believe growth will be greatest. Combined with our recent progress in search monetization, Yahoo! is well positioned to provide the broadest range of products to our advertisers while delivering the most compelling experiences to users.”
“This is a scale business and our scale is a tremendous strategic asset,” said Roy Bostock, Chairman of the board. “We are pleased to share with the market more details about our business and our expectations for Yahoo!’s financial performance, which provided context for our board’s unanimous rejection of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal. Yahoo! represents a truly unique strategic platform within our industry. The board of directors and management will continue to work closely together to ensure that any strategic path we pursue capitalizes on that uniqueness and value in a way that maximizes the benefit to our stockholders.”
Yahoo!’s investor presentation also reiterates its principal strategies, which are to enhance an already strong position as a leading starting point for users of the Internet and to be a “must buy” proposition for the most online advertisers.
Starting Points: In support of the Starting Points objective, which focuses on properties that users return to many times a day to start their Internet experience, the presentation discusses Yahoo!’s initiatives to make its front pages, Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!, as well as search, mail and mobile more open, social and relevant to users. The presentation highlights Yahoo!’s leading positions in key starting points, including the 305 million unique monthly users of its homepage and the 262 million unique monthly users of Yahoo! mail.(1)
Must Buy: The presentation also highlights the Company’s Must Buy strategic objective, which focuses on making it easier for advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks to do business with Yahoo! and with one another. Key initiatives include the development of a new ad platform designed to simplify online advertising buying and selling as well as improvements to the Panama search advertising platform. In addition to its leading position in display advertising distributed on its owned and operated sites, Yahoo! is also the second largest provider of sponsored search advertising online. Yahoo! also operates Right Media, the leading online advertising exchange, and is now ranked among the largest online advertising networks with premium partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T and many more.
The presentation notes that, in addition to Yahoo!’s strong projected operating results over the next three years, the Company’s strategic assets in Asia, including its stakes in Yahoo! Japan, Alibaba Group and Gmarket, its strong cash position, and its early leadership positions in mobile Internet and emerging markets, combine to create significant equity value.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties concerning Yahoo!’s projected financial performance (including without limitation the statements and information in the quotations from management in this press release), as well as Yahoo!’s strategic and operational plans. Actual results may differ materially from the results projected. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the implementation and results of the Company’s ongoing strategic initiatives; the Company’s ability to compete with new or existing competitors; reduction in spending by, or loss of, marketing services customers; the demand by customers for Yahoo!’s premium services; acceptance by users of new products and services; risks related to joint ventures and the integration of acquisitions; risks related to the Company’s international operations; failure to manage growth and diversification; adverse results in litigation, including intellectual property infringement claims; the Company’s ability to protect its intellectual property and the value of its brands; dependence on senior management and other key personnel; dependence on third parties for technology, services, content and distribution; general economic conditions and changes in economic conditions; and risks and uncertainties arising in connection with Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal to acquire Yahoo!, including the loss of key employees who pursue other employment opportunities due to concerns as to their employment security, increased difficulty for the Company in executing its strategic plan and pursuing other strategic opportunities, and the possibility of significant costs of defense, indemnification and liability resulting from stockholder litigation. More information about potential factors that could affect Yahoo!’s business and financial results is included under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Yahoo!’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and available online at www.sec.gov.
This press release includes projected financial performance information for 2008-2010 from the Company’s three-year financial plan presented to its board of directors in December 2007. These projections are necessarily based upon a variety of estimates and assumptions which, though currently considered reasonable by Yahoo!, may not be realized and are inherently subject, in addition to the specific risks identified above, to business, economic, competitive, industry, regulatory, market and financial uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond Yahoo!’s control. There can be no assurance that the assumptions made in preparing the projected financial performance information will prove accurate. Accordingly, actual results may differ materially from the results projected.
All information in this press release is as of March 18, 2008, unless otherwise noted, and Yahoo! does not intend, and undertakes no duty, to update or otherwise revise the information contained in this press release.
Non-GAAP Financial Measures
This press release includes the following financial measures defined as non-GAAP financial measures by the SEC: revenues excluding traffic acquisition costs or TAC (revenues ex-TAC) and operating income before depreciation, amortization, and stock-based compensation expense (OCF).These measures may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in the Appendix to the Yahoo! Investor Presentation furnished as Exhibit 99.2 to the Company’s Current Report on Form 8-K dated March 18, 2008 and can be accessed through Yahoo!’s Investor Relations website at www.yahoo.com.
March 23rd, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has launched a new research lab in Haifa, Israel — its first in the region. The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab will be led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, a renowned information organization and retrieval expert who will report directly to Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, vice president of Yahoo! Research.
The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab, which opens today, will focus on boiling down complex technology problems into simple solutions to change the game in Web search. As a demonstration of its commitment to next-generation search, Yahoo! recently opened Yahoo! Labs - Bangalore and appointed eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi to head the new India lab. Yahoo!’s arrival in Israel furthers the company’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.
“Search is still in its infancy,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “At Yahoo!, we are working on the hard core science that can lead to search experiences that are significantly beyond the current art.” He continues to say, “Ronny Lempel is a great addition to the world-class team that we have assembled to develop a new approach to Web search. His expertise in search technologies and ties to local academia will help us draw on the best talent and knowledge from across the region and strengthen our worldwide R&D efforts.”
Lempel previously worked at the Information Retrieval Group at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, focusing on research and development for enterprise search systems. Prior to joining IBM, he received his BSc., MSc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He has authored numerous papers and received several awards for his work on search engine technology, and has twice won the Best Presentation Award at the International World Wide Web Conference.
“Israel is fertile ground for incredibly talented technologists, researchers and engineers, and the Yahoo! Research Israel Lab provides the best opportunity to create the technologies that will underpin the next generation of search on the Internet,” Lempel said. “I look forward to building the Haifa team with the best talent this region has to offer.”
March 17th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has amended the Company’s bylaws to extend the deadline for nominating directors to Yahoo!’s board from March 14th to 10 days following the public announcement of the date for Yahoo!’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. As the Company has not yet announced the date of this year’s annual meeting, the amendment will give stockholders who want to nominate one or more directors, including Microsoft Corporation, more time to do so. The amendment does not preclude any party from nominating one or more directors at any time prior to the new deadline.
Yahoo!’s board of directors remains committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for Yahoo!’s stockholders. To the extent that the extension of the nomination deadline has the effect of postponing the nomination of one or more directors by any party, it will allow Yahoo!’s board to continue to explore all of its strategic alternatives for maximizing value for stockholders without the distraction of a proxy contest.
March 10th, 2008
Yahoo! continues to enable the global mobile ecosystem with the unveiling of Yahoo! onePlace™ – a revolutionary mobile content management solution. Following the company’s achievements in reinventing mobile search and mobile communications, Yahoo! onePlace is designed to be an essential tool to enable consumers to better manage the wide selection of content available across the Internet.
“Over the last three years, we have aggressively executed on our mobile strategy to deliver innovative and indispensable services to consumers globally and become the starting point for the most users. With the introduction of Yahoo! onePlace, we are announcing the next essential component to our mobile product line up,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “Yahoo! onePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions and information come from. Yahoo! onePlace will provide mobile users with a rich and dynamic content experience.”
Yahoo! onePlace™ will bring together a consumers’ interests, passions and important information into a single location – creating a rich and highly personalized experience. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept current, and served to them the way they want. So now, the content they consume and the way they consume it will be hyper-customized to their specific preferences and tastes.
Yahoo! onePlace will be simple-to-use because it will be based on a familiar process of using bookmarks to instantly link to practically any piece of content (news feeds, web sites, videos, images, emails, search queries, etc.) from anywhere across the Internet. Once in Yahoo! onePlace, everything will be kept automatically updated (with the latest game score, stock price, etc) as well as assigned categories and tags – or placed into customized “collections” that consumers create – making it extremely intuitive for consumers to find and combine their content in the ways most useful to them.
Yahoo! onePlace will allow consumers to stay better informed on the topics they care about, with less work – for their daily interests (e.g., favorite sports teams or stocks), as well as those they only care about on a selective basis. For example, if a user is planning a holiday to Paris in June, he could create a “Paris” collection, and begin linking it to any information he thinks will be useful to him on his trip: weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, walking maps, songs of Edith Piaf, English-French dictionaries, winery recommendations, etc. Yahoo! onePlace will give consumers a single location to consume all of their information contextually, keeping it updated (so they know, for example, if their flight times have changed) and instantly accessible whenever and however they want it. The product will be configured to allow consumers to do the same for literally hundreds of different topics.
Yahoo! onePlace is designed to include the following features, which will allow consumers to:
- Centralized and open content management – Centralize and manage all the content they care about, from anywhere on the Internet, accessible from a single location and arranged to best meet their preferences. The product is also designed to allow consumers to link to any favorite content they’ve already personalized on the Yahoo! network (e.g., MyYahoo!®, flickr™, del.icio.us®), or at other popular websites (e.g., Digg®, Last.FM®, reddit™, Yelp®).
- Personalized views – Enjoy their content based on their specific needs:
- Collections – Group content in a way that makes sense. For example, create a collection related to an upcoming trip, or of favorite 80’s bands.
- Categories – Organize content according to commonly-used subjects (e.g., celebrities, local businesses, sports), making it easy to access and retrieve.
- Pulse – Stream updates relevant to users’ content, such as flight status changes, new songs by a favorite music artist, or a restaurant review.
- Favorites – Surface the content a consumer uses most frequently.
- Dynamic updates – See previews for selected sources that are kept fresh throughout the day – giving users a single location for a view of what’s going on across their world.
- Mobile RSS reader – Use a mobile RSS reader integrated into Yahoo! onePlace – providing a simple way to read and subscribe to their favorite feeds.
- Smart organization – Create a rich experience around a specific topic by grouping whatever content they find most useful.
Yahoo! onePlace is expected to launch, along with Yahoo! oneConnect™, in Q2 2008, joining Yahoo!’s award-winning mobile product portfolio, which includes Yahoo! Go 3.0, Yahoo!’s new mobile homepage and Yahoo! oneSearch™. After its release, Yahoo! onePlace is expected to become available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers around the world.
March 6th, 2008
Yahoo! today introduced Yahoo! Buzz, an extension to Yahoo.com that opens up the Internet’s leading starting point by uncovering the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the Internet and bringing more buzz-worthy stories to the homepage of Yahoo!. Currently in beta, Yahoo! Buzz measures consumer votes and search patterns to identify interesting and timely stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the Web. Top stories are then given primary editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.
Yahoo! Buzz can highlight anything - a major news event, an intriguing video or image, or an interesting blog post - and instead of editors, real people vote and search for their favorite stories to determine the top rated content from across the Web. Yahoo! Buzz ranks the most popular content of the moment using a unique approach that combines consumer votes with search popularity to give a story a Buzz Score. This new initiative creates a lens on what people are most interested in to enhance relevance on the popular Yahoo.com, and help publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo!’s broad and diverse audience of more than 500 million users.
“Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers,” said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo! Network Division. “In addition, we recently announced that we will be opening up our user interface for Yahoo! Search, as well as creating a smarter inbox by opening up Yahoo! Mail, two other key ways that consumers start with Yahoo!.”
“With Yahoo! Buzz, we are building on the recent success of the homepage of Yahoo! and improving consumers’ favorite online starting point, by combining popular stories with the wisdom of real people to determine what is most engaging and relevant,” said Tapan Bhat, vice president, Front Doors and Network Services, Yahoo!. “Consumer engagement with the Yahoo! homepage has increased nearly 20 percent year-over-year, evidence that continuing to open up and provide consumers with direct links out to third party publishers keeps people coming back to Yahoo! again and again.”
Yahoo! Buzz Brings Publishers’ Content to Internet’s Largest Audience
Yahoo! Buzz builds on an openness initiative Yahoo! launched last year in which editors began highlighting third-party content from across the Web in the “Featured Today” module on Yahoo.com. This effort has already provided tremendous value for consumers and publishers, representing a first step in the creation of a more open system for Web content. “When Yahoo! linked to People.com’s Sexiest Man Alive coverage, referrals from Yahoo! increased by over 11 times versus the average day,” said Fran Hauser, President, People Digital.
“Getting a link on Yahoo!’s Front Page is like connecting to a fire hose,” said Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief, Wired.com. “Thanks to this program, we got more than 2 million page views in less than two hours from a single headline, helping to drive a 1400 percent increase in Yahoo! referral traffic versus the previous month and enabling us to reach a vast audience that may not otherwise see the stories we publish on Wired.com.”
In its beta phase, Yahoo! Buzz includes content from nearly 100 publishers, ranging from large online publishing brands to small, influential blogs, and will grow from there to open up to all publishers interested in having their content included in Yahoo! Buzz. Participating publishers are given an online ‘badge’ enabling their readers to vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time. Stories with the highest Buzz Scores will be highlighted via direct links to the publishers’ sites from http://buzz.yahoo.com and submitted to Yahoo.com’s editors for possible coverage on the Yahoo! homepage. Additionally, Yahoo! allows users to submit Buzz stories to social news sites including delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
New Tools for Publishers and Advertisers
As Yahoo! Buzz evolves, it will form the basis for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers. Yahoo! will develop this ecosystem by building out new syndication and monetization tools that enable publishers to share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. For example, a Yahoo! Buzz API will enable publishers to add customized Yahoo! Buzz modules or shortcuts to their sites to showcase their own most buzzed items or other popular stories on relevant topics. Over time, we expect this to extend into a powerful content exchange that connects owners of content with distributors of traffic.
February 26th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has expanded its growing network of newspaper partnerships with the addition of four publishers, including Shaw Newspapers and its 25 daily and weekly newspapers covering northern Illinois and Iowa, The Buffalo News and its paper that covers Buffalo, NY, the Times Publishing Company that produces The Erie Times News in Erie, PA, and the Columbian Publishing Company that publishes The Columbian in Vancouver, WA. With the addition of these publishers, the Newspaper Consortium now includes 634 participating newspapers, 425 of which are dailies - 30 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers and 37 percent of all U.S. Sunday circulation.(1)
“Yahoo!’s continued momentum with the newspaper industry shows that current and new Consortium members value the opportunity to combine the newspapers’ own unmatched local news and deep local advertising relationships with Yahoo!’s leading technologies and extensive online audience,” said Lem Lloyd, vice president, Newspaper Consortium for Yahoo!, Inc. “We’ve already seen tremendous growth and have captured valuable local audience share across every major U.S. region through integration with Yahoo! HotJobs and the newspaper partners.”
Yahoo! has more than tripled the number of member companies in the Consortium since its inception in November 2006, significantly strengthening its Advertiser/Publisher Network and advancing its advertising strategy to be the “must buy” for the most advertisers.
“We’re in the infancy of a relationship between Yahoo! and our newspaper consortium that already exceeds our expectations,” said Jay Smith, President of Cox Newspapers, Inc. “Roughly one-third of the U.S.’s newspapers, including ours, believe a better day is here with this unique partnership of 634 newspapers and Yahoo!. We are seeing impressive results as our sales teams offer Yahoo! inventory to our local advertisers. As our consortium grows, so, too, will our success.”
Yahoo!’s partnership with the Newspaper Consortium spans multiple initiatives, including for many members, the adoption of Yahoo! HotJobs as their exclusive online recruitment solution, the distribution of headlines across Yahoo!, the adoption of Yahoo! Search on newspaper sites, cross-selling of advertising with newspapers’ local sales forces selling local advertisers’ inventory on Yahoo! and Yahoo!’s national sales force selling national advertising on newspapers’ sites. Many of the members also will be exclusively using the Yahoo! ad platform to sell display advertising on their sites.
To date, Yahoo! HotJobs has launched co-branded career sites serving more than 425 U.S. newspapers. By integrating with the newspaper partners and delivering better reach, relevance and performance, Yahoo! HotJobs has experienced 50 percent year-over-year traffic growth, becoming the fastest growing Web site among the leading job boards and surpassing Monster.com in the U.S.(2)
In addition to the Yahoo! HotJobs implementations, the first phase of advertising cross-sales has begun, with the sales staffs of several newspapers integrating Yahoo! inventory into sales packages for their local advertisers. The program will be expanded during the next several months, allowing Consortium members to target ads to specific audience segments. To date, 126 of the Consortium newspapers now also feature Yahoo! Search on their sites.
The newspaper publishers that have most recently joined the Newspaper Consortium are:
Shaw Newspapers, based in northern Illinois and publishing 25 daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Iowa, all of which will be implementing Yahoo! HotJobs on their sites. Of those newspapers, 13 of them will also participate in the Yahoo! Core Services components of the Newspaper Consortium-Yahoo! relationship, providing them with Yahoo! Search on their sites, as well as enabling their local sales forces to sell their local advertisers ads on Yahoo! and the Yahoo! sales force to sell national advertisers onto the newspaper Web sites. Additionally, these newspapers’ content will be distributed in key locations on Yahoo!, including Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo! and Yahoo! News.
The Buffalo News, which serves the Buffalo/Niagara region of the state of New York, will participate in all aspects of the Yahoo!-Newspaper Consortium partnership, including Yahoo! HotJobs and all the Core Services components.
The Times Publishing Company, which produces The Erie Times News in Erie, Pennsylvania, also joins the Newspaper Consortium to co-brand its ErieCareers.com classified business with Yahoo! HotJobs. The Erie Times News serves Erie County and surrounding towns on the shore of Lake Erie, including eastern Ohio, western New York and northern Crawford County.
The Columbian Publishing Company of Vancouver, Washington, publishes The Columbian and will join the Newspaper Consortium to incorporate Yahoo! HotJobs into their site. The Columbian serves the Portland, OR / Vancouver, WA area.
With the addition of these newspapers to the Newspaper Consortium, it now includes 26 publishing companies and has a presence in 42 of the top 50 DMAs in the United States.
Other Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium members include: Belo Corp.; Calkins Media, Inc.; Columbus Dispatch; The Day Publishing Company; The E.W. Scripps Company; GateHouse Media, Inc.; Hearst Newspapers; Herald Media, Inc.; Journal Register Company; Lee Enterprises; McClatchy Company; Media General, Inc.; Morris Communications Company, LLC; MediaNews Group, Inc.; Paddock Publications, Inc; Paxton Media Group; Philadelphia Media Holdings, LLC; The New York Daily News; The New York Times Regional Group; Times-Shamrock Communications; and the Tribune Review Publishing Company.
The newspapers represented by the Newspaper Consortium include major market dailies such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Herald, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Florida Times-Union, Houston Chronicle, The Miami Herald, New Haven Register, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Rocky Mountain News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and The Tampa Tribune.
(1) Editor and Publisher, 2006
(2) comScore Media Metrix Career Resources, 2008 vs. 2007
February 21st, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has sent a letter to its stockholders, outlining the reasons the Board believes that Microsoft’s proposal significantly undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of Yahoo! stockholders.
In the letter Yahoo! says:
“(Yahoo!’s) assets - our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments–are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.
“We have a huge market opportunity - and are uniquely positioned to capitalize on it. The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly 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.
“Today, Yahoo! is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company than it was just a few months ago. We have redeployed our resources to drive Yahoo!’s key strategic priorities - taking important steps to streamline our organization and close down or scale back businesses that don’t support these critical growth initiatives. We are well on our way to transforming the experiences of Yahoo!’s users, advertisers, publishers and developers - an important shift that is at the heart of our plan to create stockholder value.”
A copy of the letter follows:
Dear Stockholders,
On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire your company. As much has been reported in the press recently, I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!’s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders.
Most importantly, I want you to know that your Board is continuously evaluating all of Yahoo!’s strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment, and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our stockholders.
We have a unique combination of strengths
– Yahoo! is one of the most recognizable and admired brands in the world. We have over 500 million users (nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users worldwide). In the U.S., we are # 1 in many of the most used online services including personalized home pages, mail, news, music, shopping and travel. Because we have leadership positions in so many indispensable online services, users spend more time on Yahoo! sites than anywhere else online.
– Yahoo! is an attractive partner for marketers. Yahoo! is #1 in online display advertising, which represents 90% of the advertising inventory on the web, and we are also a leader in search marketing and a pioneer in the growing fields of mobile advertising and online video advertising. Through Yahoo!, advertisers can now connect with consumers on our owned sites as well as those of our growing network of partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers, Forbes.com, Cars.com, WebMD and more.
– Yahoo! has the financial flexibility to execute our plans, thanks to our healthy cash balance, which exceeded $2 billion as of December 31, 2007, and our substantial operating cash flow, which we expect to grow double digits in 2009.
– Yahoo! has made important investments in our core computing infrastructure enabling us to dramatically increase the speed of our search engine updates even while handling vast and growing quantities of data.
– In addition, we have the added value of our substantial, unconsolidated investments in Japan and China. We have substantial positions in Yahoo! Japan, the leader in its market, and Alibaba, which is strongly positioned in China, a market with enormous growth potential.
These assets–our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments–are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.
We have a huge market opportunity - and are uniquely positioned to capitalize on it
The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly 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.
We are executing our strategy - and making headway
We have taken significant but disciplined steps to refocus our business on our objectives to become the starting point for the most consumers and the must buy for the most advertisers and enhance Yahoo!’s long-term performance.
Starting Point Objective: Our goal is to grow visits to key Yahoo! starting points and properties, where users enter the Internet, by 15% per year over the next several years. We are the most visited site in the U.S., and we continue to grow - we experienced double-digit growth in U.S. users in 2007 on our Yahoo.com home page.
In addition to traditional starting points on the PC - including our home pages, mail, My Yahoo! and search, we are particularly excited about our growth prospects in mobile, the biggest emerging starting point in the world. Globally, there are twice as many users of mobile devices as users of personal computers, and mobile advertising is projected to grow substantially in the coming years. We have an important competitive edge as the number one mobile destination in the U.S., and we are building a superior mobile experience for Yahoo! users globally so we can further capitalize on this opportunity.
Must Buy Objective: We are working to make online advertising easier and more effective for marketers, opening up new ways for them to connect with consumers. We’ve successfully completed the global roll-out of our search marketing system, Panama, which improved the search experience for our users, boosted returns for our advertisers, and increased revenue for Yahoo!. Last year, we bought Right Media, an exchange that enables buyers and sellers of online advertising to come together. Another 2007 acquisition, Blue Lithium, brings us best-in-class performance marketing capabilities, complementing Yahoo!’s existing offerings for advertisers. We also integrated our search advertising and display advertising sales forces, creating a one-stop shop for all of advertisers’ online marketing needs. All of these - Panama, Right Media, Blue Lithium, and our combined sales efforts - complement and enhance Yahoo!’s existing capabilities and will make it easier for advertisers and online publishers to buy and sell advertising online.
We are also creating a unique and valuable network of premium websites to serve our advertisers. We are making it easier for our advertisers to provide interesting and relevant offers to our users by combining advertising space on Yahoo!’s owned sites with that from a growing group of premium partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers and many others.
As we reach more users both on our own websites and on the sites of our premium partners, and better monetize the ad space on Yahoo!’s owned and operated sites, we are striving to increase the percentage of total online advertising demand we touch from an estimated 15% in 2007 to 20% over the next several years.
These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers - and help enrich the user experience.
We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time - and we are focused on building this momentum
Today, Yahoo! is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company than it was just a few months ago. We have redeployed our resources to drive Yahoo!’s key strategic priorities - taking important steps to streamline our organization and close down or scale back businesses that don’t support these critical growth initiatives. The fact is that we are well on our way to transforming the experiences of Yahoo!’s users, advertisers, publishers and developers - an important shift that is at the heart of our plan to create stockholder value.
I want you to know that the Yahoo! Board of Directors and management team remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our Yahoo! stockholders. This is a great company and we are moving quickly to make it even better.
Jerry Yang
February 14th, 2008
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