Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum
As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight
Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.
If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic. This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.
Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership. Make it possible for me to make money on your network. If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo. I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow. And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.
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