El Ruso

Yahoo! Analyst Day: Why it pays off to read analyst presentations

May 23rd, 2006

Deviant Abstraction points to a very interesting 188-slide presentation of Yahoo’s strategy. As Nicolas Toper seems to be right about blogosphere silence, I’ll try and make some noise. A lot of people underestimate the value of investor presentations to gain insight into corporate strategy and this one is particularly tedious and long (they usually run at 20-30 slides)
There’s a lot to be perused there, but the most interesting idea is this strategy, summed up in a list:

1. Use Yahoo’s huge user reach (500M+ users) to build up a critical mass
2. Use that critical mass to launch/strengthen a social network-type application e.g.
• Yahoo! Answers (social search)
• Flickr (integration into Olympics and general news coverage)
• Now almost 30% of Y! web search page views
3. Take advantage of “social search” to strengthen traditional search (happened in Taiwan where Yahoo! won market share from Google)
4. Monetize (the average revenue per user went from 35 cents per month in 2001 to 79 cents in 2004)
5. Rinse and repeat.

Read/WriteWeb is the other blog with interesting analysis of other parts of presentation

Entry Filed under: Web 2.0