Mayer: Great opportunities for search, display, mobile and video

Absrtact: Despite Yahoo's success in 2012, the company's CEO, Mayer, is well aware of the key to success in the company's future by improving the UI to improve the user experience, accelerate internationalization, and diversify the user's reach. Here is the article

Despite Yahoo's impressive performance in 2012, the company's CEO, Mayer, is well aware of the key to the company's success in the future by improving the UI to improve the user experience, accelerate internationalization, and diversify the user's reach.

Here's what the article is about: Yahoo has been in turmoil for the last few years, with its sluggish operating conditions, the internal battles of its top board, and the "Academic gate" scandal of former CEO Scott Thompson, which has challenged the former internet giant Yahoo's employees and shareholders are eager to have some good news to boost morale. In July 2012, Marissa Mayer, Google's former vice-president, formally assumed the post of Yahoo CEO, and under her leadership, Yahoo began to slowly get back on track, giving investors a glimpse of Yahoo's hope of reviving its glories.

Good earnings performance

In Monday, Yahoo announced the fourth quarter of 2012 earnings, excluding the cost of traffic acquisition (TAC) after the revenue reached 1.221 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 4%; According to non-US GAAP, excluding equity incentive spending, diluted earnings per share of 0.32 U.S. dollars. Ms. Mayer has been a Yahoo CEO for exactly two quarters, and the company's fourth-quarter results show that under Mayer's leadership, Yahoo is moving towards a recovery.

However, we must realize that Mayer and Yahoo's honeymoon period is about to pass, she has not yet faced the real test. So is Mayer able to make the company's customers, employees and shareholders full of confidence that her lead Yahoo can revive its brilliance? Ms. Mayer recently unveiled a plan to revive Yahoo at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (economic Forum).

Yahoo's fourth-quarter revenue exceeded expectations, compared with its overall revenue growth of 26% in the first half of 2012, enough to keep management optimistic about the company's future prospects.

Talent recruitment and mergers and acquisitions

Ms. Mayer said in a Yahoo earnings conference call that the company was reorganizing its talent-recruiting program. "In the past many years, Yahoo has completely ignored the importance of talent and turned into an extremely bureaucratic company," she said. We want to change that situation quickly and reduce the company's internal friction by employing capable employees. This strategy has yielded good results, and over the past 6 months, a large number of competent job seekers have entered the Yahoo team. ”

In the process of attracting top talent to Yahoo, Ms. Mayer's charisma played a key role. In Ms. Mayer's persuasion, the entrepreneurial master Max Levchin (Max), former Disney executive Sandy Gould and other well-known executives have joined Yahoo. In addition, Mayer also through the internal potential, the appointment of Adam Cahan (Adam Cahan) as head of the mobile department, and from the financial results of the quarter, the latter's performance did not disappoint Mayer's trust. Yahoo's team is becoming more and more powerful.

While strengthening the management of the staff team, Yahoo also accelerated the pace of mergers and acquisitions. Last October, Yahoo bought a mobile app developer, stamped, and in December acquired a video-chat start-up company, Ontheair, which last week bought a content-integration platform snip.it. Through these acquisitions, Yahoo has expanded its business and gained more revenue.

"We want to let users form the habit of digital life," Ms Mayer said of Yahoo's development goals in the Mobile world. "The latest Flickr Mobile, and Yahoo Mail, launched in December, shows that the company is working towards that goal."

Three major challenges

"For Yahoo, the most important business opportunities are the search, display, mobile and video sectors, especially search engines, and we still have a lot of room to grow," Mayer said. "Yahoo will improve the company's employment relationship through a more personalized and humane management model," she said. In addition, although Yahoo is currently in the mobile area is not obvious, but the future will continue to increase investment, and in the past six months, Yahoo's mobile business has received some advertising orders. "It's a good start, though not much," Mayer said. ”

As for Yahoo's future challenges, Ms. Mayer focuses on three points: first, by improving the UI to enhance the user experience, followed by accelerating internationalization, and finally the wider realization of user diversification. "The priorities of these three points reflect their importance," she said. ”

While Yahoo's profitability in the mobile sector is not ideal, Ms. Mayer believes that from a perspective of development prospects, Yahoo is still worth looking forward to. She said: "We have a large common user base, their user behavior can be directly related to new mobile applications, users can be extremely convenient to query weather information, browse news, email and so on." In addition, we have added a lot of content to the mobile sector, which will greatly enhance the Platform's appeal to smartphones and tablet users, who have developed the habit of accessing Yahoo via mobile devices. So for us, how to make content more valuable has become the company's most important task at present. ”

Of course, Yahoo now desperately needs to solve the problem is how to use mobile related content and applications to make money. Mayer was prepared for this, and she often thought about it when she was in Google, though it was too early to make a profit for Yahoo's mobile office, but she had a plan in mind.

According to Yahoo's latest quarterly earnings, another source of concern for Ms. Mayer is that 75% of Yahoo's revenue comes from the U.S. region. This requires a change in Yahoo to expand its business to other parts of the world and make it more international.

Analysts question

How Yahoo has developed mobile-related businesses and how to make money in the field has been the focus of analysts ' attention in this earnings conference call. Ms. Mayer was reluctant to explain the company's policy to the mobile sector, but some analysts said: "Does Yahoo focus its resources on the mobile division, which could lead to a product conflict between its mobile-related applications and the PC search business?"

Ms. Mayer responded by saying: "It may not be possible to avoid some product conflicts in the end, but we are positioning ourselves as the most insightful team in the mobile field." We will focus our 50% developers on the mobile sector and tilt our corporate resources into this area because we need and will develop unique mobile-related products. ”

She added: "In the fourth quarter of 2012, we recruited 120 additional computer professionals, most of whom would enter the mobile or video sector." ”

As of now, no company has gained a lot of money in the mobile sector, analysts say. "At the moment, our most important task is to rearrange the quality of service in mobile applications, adjust pricing strategies, and think about how to embed ads to make it easier for users to accept," Ms Mayer explains. It is not important for advertisers to advertise in this area when users flood into the mobile world, because the key is how to provide better advertising services. ”

Many years ago, Ms. Mayer was not optimistic that search engines would make a profit, but it now seems to be an outrageous view. Ms Mayer says Yahoo is doing a lot of user research on the mobile side, so when the company decides to put it into action, "We'll be in a better position." ”

But some analysts disagree. So in terms of research and development input, Yahoo is not ahead of rivals, which may have an impact on the company's innovation path. "We're investing in a small, responsive team focused on the ipad, IPhone, Android platform," Ms Mayer said. We know very well that everything is small to large, just as a small river can eventually converge into a river. ”

"We firmly believe that our team will develop better products and we hope our efforts will make the world a better place." "said Mayer.

The future of Yahoo search

Of course, not to overlook the search engine business. "In the future, the search business will remain a key investment for the company, and Yahoo's Search alliance with Microsoft has boosted the growth of the business," Mayer said. ”

Analysts said that this shows that Ms. Mayer is still confident of Yahoo Search, and will be in the search interface to add additional input. It's not hard to make a breakthrough in the search engine field, because every single innovation in search engines is limited to innovation on the search interface and search access level, whether it's for a traditional PC or a mobile device.

Ms. Mayer revealed that Apple's Siri voice control function is based on Yahoo's data, as does the link to Siri's services. "We will continue to invest in this area." "said Mayer.

Mayer believes that the future of the search engine will be personalized and intelligent direction of development. In order to make the search service more personalized and intelligent, search engines must have a very clear understanding of where users are and the key sources they search for, and the search engine will evolve in these two directions over the next 3-5 years, she said at the Davos forum.

This means that Yahoo will continue to develop more personalized and intelligent search services, based on a survey of users ' interests. Analysts said Yahoo would collect users ' every time they browsed the company's homepage and form a separate database, and its search engines would use those databases to provide personalized and intelligent search services.

Of course, Yahoo's management is not lack of creativity, but compared to the previous Yahoo, can produce these ideas is a great progress. Of course, it is not easy to make these ideas come true and eventually turn them into profits, and we cannot imagine that Yahoo will be able to avoid the fierce market competition and find a way to revive its brilliance. But it is a good start for Yahoo to be able to inspire such high morale under Mayer's leadership.