If you love something, set it free and it will come back to you, says the old adage. But as Sue Decker, President of Yahoo! explains, this sentiment also applies to advertising-driven online real estate. The front page of the popular search engine has always been a popular destination - and a great source of revenue for the company. But Decker explains why Yahoo! has chosen to eschew solid revenue in exchange for allowing that space to be controlled by the interest of its users - and the message that gesture sends to the Yahoo! community.

Transcript



Here's another example that's both open and social. So our homepage, Yahoo!'s homepage, is the most valuable real estate on the web. This ad, this is a several hundred millions of revenue a year. People come to our homepage multiple times per day. If you compare it to any newspaper or any other analog, it's extraordinarily valuable. What we didn't do in the past is open it up to third parties. We used it as a way to send people in Yahoo! You have all the links here, navigation, we send them to things in Yahoo! And some of the things we do are the best in the world but we're not going to have a monopoly on the best ideas. So what we've created are these buzz badges and we distributed them to our newspaper consortiums. So as you're reading something really cool, you hit buzz and you rate it real time. And that gets accumulated. We just launched this a few weeks ago. And then it surfaces that content on our front page. So all the time our today module is surfacing the things from all over the web that you guys are seeing, experiencing, and pulsing that are very interesting. We have Salon.com. We got them to a million users in a day for the first time ever. We are literally melting websites, other publishers because the traffic is so incredible by using the power of our homepage. Why are we doing that? Because if this is more relevant, people are going to keep coming back. Like a cup of coffee everyday, multiple times to the homepage and we'll sell more ads. The theory, if you love something let it free, it will come back to you. It's the model of search. You go to search not because you think you're going to end there. It's the journey not the destination. We're trying to make a lot of the Yahoo! properties a part of the journey and helping people get to the right destination.

1. The Guiding Light of Customer-Centricity
2. An Unscalable Ecosystem
3. An Unscalable Ecosystem
4. The Three Phases of Yahoo!
5. Delivering the Customer to the Advertiser
6. Open and Social
7. On the Verge of an Acquisition?
8. Monetizing Search Capabilities

Sue Decker from Yahoo! Inc. lectures on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students, May 7, 2008. As the president of Yahoo! Inc., Susan L. Decker is a key participant in determining Yahoo!'s business strategy and vision. She is responsible for all of the global business operations of Yahoo!, including sales, product marketing, and distribution across the three major customer groups of audience, advertisers, and publishers. In this Stanford lecture, she talks about the three phases of Yahoo!, delivering the customer to the advertiser and the guiding light of customer-centricity.

Course Details:
- Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lectures
- Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner)

Original Course Name: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lectures