Prem Panicker, Managing Editor, Yahoo India
Prem comes with 17 years of rich experience in journalism with both print and online medium. As the Managing Editor of Yahoo! India, Prem is responsible for the editorial content for Yahoo! India, across its industry leading properties including- Yahoo! Home Page, Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Movies and Yahoo! Finance amongst others.
Prem comes with 17 years of rich experience in journalism with both print and online medium. As the Managing Editor of Yahoo! India, Prem is responsible for the editorial content for Yahoo! India, across its industry leading properties including- Yahoo! Home Page, Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Movies and Yahoo! Finance amongst others.
Q. In a website, there are situational conflicts for space between ad sales and content etc. Is there a time when you let go off content? How do you deal with that? I really don’t want to mention conflicts that happen in a larger organisation but within Yahoo, from the time I have been a part, we believe that all the partners mesh and interoperability building that we as an organisation kind of function at optimum, if everybody knows what everybody else is doing, we don’t necessarily take a decision from a content perspective or sales perspective. We make a decision from the Yahoo perspective. For example we just launched a microsite for Dove, sales-sales goes out and creates a high traffic section; somebody who, lets say, types cosmetics/beauty probably wants to associate it with entertainment etc and you have banners for stuff like that, and here we are good at creating content, thinking through story lines and narratives and talking through themes and thinking what content suits the theme. We don’t really have content which says XYZ brand is brilliant, you use Dove and your skin glows and whatever happens. But we are going to create content that is ‘themed’ beauty. Generally what does beauty means to you-how much of a co-relation is there between inner beauty and outer beauty and all of that stuff. We have been creating content now as far as space allocation is concerned we have let’s say Saina Nehwal talking about the beauty of sportsperson and that person’s life-how to stay beautiful in adverse condition, even if not concerned with Dove it gives a holistic approach about beauty, we don’t really want to get into debate about content or advertising, if it is a clear advertising pitch then it doesn’t belong to content space. We keep differentiating between content and between advertising content. I give you an example of advertising content that is content anyways, you will probably find that content anywhere in the world, in the lifestyle magazine. What makes you think about the content of the other kind, you know the editorial content. That does not have an advertising implication, somebody putting a banner, so we don’t really bother about what happened typically internally in Yahoo! and we have all these weekly calls where all the section heads are part of it, department heads are part of it, we make sure that everyone else is updated on what the others are doing and all these issues come up there. We don’t have a philosophical conflict.
Q. How important is content for Yahoo!? It’s the game that we have been leaders for the last number of years, why I joined Yahoo! because it has tremendous potential as it completely dominates the content space within India. Globally Yahoo! dominates the whole of lot of countries. Yahoo! is I think the number 1 in-terms of content consumption, domination and leads. I don’t want to comment on the figures, they are all on the public domain. We already know that the content space has historically been dominated by us. People keep asking about Yahoo! Is content crucial but a year from now you wouldn’t have to ask this.
Q. How important is news coming from the wires? We pick up news from the wires, but whatever we think as a news, so here let’s say there is a product launch on the wire, we have particular property coming, that will include a lot of lifestyle products, but there, let’s take a hypothetical example a big brand car launch, carrying the press release is a PR exercise. It might be in the luxury segment, we will probably do a story that concerns the larger universe about the whole industry and where this brand has a role to play, now that is the editorial content. So if you are very clear that what you want to do as a content head and largely as an organisation then issues don’t arise. Arun is very clear in what he will permit and what he will not, Sales has their line in place and we know what we have to.
Q. How is Yahoo! doing on the language front? We currently have Dainik Jagran, and we are so excited by what is happening with this that within the next few months you will find that vernacular is going to play a huge role and we are expanding our languages. For example, in five months, you are going to play World Cup- you come to Yahoo! to see the straight preview, below that you see larger narratives topical blogs, below that what have you had a smart search option; not exactly a search platform that integrates you to some 50 links but 3-4 of the links that relates to the exact same topic and below that- what if you could consume what your language newspaper of choice was actually saying about the match and larger narratives. What if all of that in one space? Like I earlier said, we don’t put things in basket; we work in a basket. So we see in this jigsaw, we begin to get our blogs right, we get opinions right, we are going to launch opinions for cricket as well within a month. We have got some new launches coming up, all of this falls in place you will see a picture which will spell content. But our definition of content is considerably more agnostic, considerably more far reaching than probably the industry developments.
Q. Editors and Sub-Editors are designated at desks. Where do you think Yahoo! gives a chance to the unsung heroes to showcase their talent in a better form? Yahoo! newsroom until very recently was almost like what you mentioned- that people sitting in the content, none of them had any hand in it really etc etc, I have been sitting in Yahoo! for eight months now and have been figuring out the Yahoo! content strategy- what we need to implement, steps from where we are right now and where do we want to see ourselves. For me, content is what I have done all my life. Because Yahoo! is interested and Yahoo! has platform that makes me believe that anything we do will go to far wider an audience. That made up my mind for me. So, you look at any content house, you don’t know who is working there, so now go to Yahoo! you have 15 people working there, you have all of their bylines and it’s all transparent in that blog which we launched in June. A blog can be seen as a niche thing but it can be seen as an attempt to voice the newsroom. We have an idea that where we are going to take the blogs- what kind of news will go out of that blog. Right now we are under training for that. Basically we had an opportunity for the people who have never had a public profile to acquire that and yesterday we were looking at some numbers. After the blogs were launched, we had about 8.6 million page views, there are may be about 20-25 blogs in the world who will play those sort of figures and these are established blogs. This was just in the first month of the operation. Once you give them a voice and a platform, we believe it works. Giving them opportunity to write and page views is half the story. For me content works with touch and feel, they want to engage with it. There has been a day which had 6,00,000 plus page views and all these blogs were by journalists, who were till then were never writing. That is the bet what we play with content. Couple of weeks before launching Yahoo! blogs we launched Yahoo! Opinion. We picked people who are good at what they do, like Deepak Shinoy, who lives on the market, knows what he is talking about.
Q. Is Yahoo! looking at integrating news with social media? No we don’t need to. See the thing is, you have a Facebook account and how is one integrating it? We have integrated that in a blog but we don’t necessarily have to integrate that in a ‘thing’. We will probably at some point, but what we do is we engage people in conversation, these people who are following us and increasingly we are getting followers added on at the rate of about 20 new followers every day. That’s been a recent noticeable trend. We do 2 things: 1- We don’t give them all the stories that are published on Yahoo! that is again plugged with new links that are nothing to do with them, but we throw on topical stories just when people are talking about it, secondly we ask people questions, we listen to their answers, sometimes we use that on our blog. We use that content to showcase and then we are back on the Twitter, we getting traffic from there and Facebook has also become a part of our strategy. We are not building a world garden-that nothing will come from outside and nothing will go out. We are completely an open space. We believe that users need to determine what they will do. And our job is to facilitate that discovery. We make sure the content the user wants is high quality and topical and relevant, but we also make sure that you can consume it in any fashion that you want. Through the medium of the blog, opinion, my job is to provide information; it’s your job to consume content.
Q. Is Yahoo! homepage dependant on subjects like that of bollywood, sex etc? For us internally in editorial, you have the space which is a carousal. Basically the carousal I structured in certain way that you can have four packages uploaded at a time and it has to be multiples of four. That is my FrontPage. Here is the deal that when we make these calls, we see the relevance of the news and add pictures and videos on our front page. When we make choices in the content we make them on the basis of- are they visually driven or not. For instance, videos are going to be a big part of our work going forward, and in this framework you have a choice. If someone goes and takes a video of the common wealth infrastructure, so will you upload the picture over there or will you review the news? So here on the carousal we put a small video. We as a journalist read about Bollywood, so why are we sneering about it. If only Bollywood content sells then I have a problem, but not if the content is balanced. If we thought that Bollywood only sells it then why not, why do I have columnists writing about foreign affairs? Today for instance about international stories, yesterdays was politics. I am clearly saying that Bollywood is not the only thing that sells. Cricket sells, bollywood sells- we need to know what sells and encash on that.
Q. Since they are confined into this, do you plan to give them standalone opportunities? When you start formulating a content strategy, you need to know where you want to be and you need to know what steps you need to take in order to achieve that. Yahoo!’s business has been dominated by aggregation, so we have a lot of content that is aggregated by lot of our partners. We needed to look at every single partner and make a call on business and actually the content that you want. So we started roping in other content providers who we think will create a more engaging bouquet of content, this is one part of the story. Once we have a content in place then the challenge is to surface them in a relevant manner which we can see on the front page; which is where the curation comes in- when we take the multiple elements of content from all our vendors and stick them together, may be through the blogs or may be through a news item. Today whatever is the hot topic, you can go to a newspaper or you can go to a standalone website and you can get what that site has done. Going forward you will come to Yahoo! and know what the entire spectrum of people are talking about- but not in terms of just giving you a lot of links. It’s in terms of summarising, providing precise information that is relevant for the story and then giving you all the tools to dig deeper supplemented by the blog- which is an opinion, supplemented with analysis and insights so that creates a package for you which is content, supplementary content and context. So your content is basically your story itself, supplementary content is something that can be done through the blog- you can go through the entire universe that relates to the content and put it there, but then somebody needs to create a context for that to give it a narrative brain. There is no such thing as standalone, it’s just going out and doing it. You know I started my career at the news desk and that is the place still where I love to be.
Q. Is space an issue when doing something online with Vernacular? No, space is never an issue, Dainik Jagran is sitting at a corner of a Yahoo! front page. If you look at it on the left side you will the Dainik Jagran link it’s getting you millions of page views and millions of users - so it’s about optimizing space, it’s about- do I want to have 10 headlines in 10 languages on my front page? NO. What if I want to have 10 languages attached to every single story, what if I want to create 10 packages? We tend to think that a package needs to be in English…Why? The package could be in English as a lead, but it can have multiple links in different languages for multiple targets. I don’t think space is an issue, I don’t think surfacing and engagement is an issue, I think it’s breaking down that mental barrier that if it goes in vernacular languages do we really want to park it; I think it needs to be upfront. We are a nation of multiple languages- we should be making best use of that.
Q. What kind of stories are important on a particular day for Yahoo!? Yahoo! realizes that there are certain events that will create news. Once the budget is announced- any news room will guarantee you a budget story. So what does an editorial person do? There are people coming in for a specific reason and there are those who are not coming every day. We are just coming here because today we feel- This is important therefore I go there. Likewise for cricket, Yahoo! has cricket content; it’s currently number one in the cricket space, so people are coming for that. Currently out of the 100 per cent cricket space Yahoo! shares a unique users of 47 per cent of unique users and cricinfo is 41 or 42 per cent. People go for cricket on X site, as a company why should it bother you? As long as you can provide compelling content people will come to you too. I don’t expect you as a reader, who comes to Yahoo!, to go nowhere else. I am fine if you got to 50 sites. What I need to ensure is that my site is relevant for you and that you have a reason to come to me. What you do the rest of the time is entirely your business. From June 2009-June 2010, there is a 35 per cent growth on the front page, greater than the market growth. It’s a well organized super market, for instance you come to Yahoo! only for cricket but I will show you five other reasons why you should come to Yahoo! which is apart from cricket. For me a cricket match, or a budget or a release of a new movie or anything is a great market to cross from.
Q. When you revamp your products like emails keeping in mind your competition, do you think that content plays a major role? It’s not relevant for me, Yahoo! as a company, talking about what other people in various places- is not our business. We never ever discuss about any other site when we plan, the minute you start thinking that somebody is doing this and therefore you are doing that, you are thinking is straight jacketed now. What Yahoo! does with its email, or messenger or its products is factor of Yahoo!’s strategy, It’s not necessarily a response to or a reaction to what somebody else is doing. When we take a property- there is a direction that we go on. Like I know what I want Yahoo! to be in the content space, I know what I want Yahoo! to be in 2 years from now on and everything that I am doing is basically planned and conceptualized around that. I don’t compulsively keep checking sites, I do not do it. Keep your focus on what you are doing; don’t worry about what competition is doing. The more you focus on your roadmap the better job you do.
Q. Are you planning to revamp any of your Yahoo! products? All of that is a part of revamping, like we have a new news properties coming up, we have new finance properties coming up, we have lifestyle property coming up, we have properties in the entertainment space coming up. Each of these would be a very strong segment. We are basically creating a bed rock, cricket also we are revamping very soon. Once we have done with all of that, by the first quarter of next year, we will have all these in place. Each of them is a very strong property in themselves. And then what we will do is, we will fine tune it and use the FrontPage to both showcase the product and also as an entry point.
Worldcup is coming in India, and Yahoo! is ICC’s partner, we are pretty much the official partners and the destination. We have been partners for the last seven months. We know right now that by next year February we will be hugely tight in that particular property.
Q. What are the plans in designing Yahoo! content for the coming year? Yahoo! has dominated the content landscape globally for more than 5 years now. Whatever search, mail, or messenger or whatever social media or content, Yahoo! has quietly done a lot of stuff and dominated every single thing. We are number one in mails and we are number one in movies, we are number one in cricket. If media can’t look at Yahoo! as content destination it’s not Yahoo!’s problem- it’s the media’s problem. Yahoo! has systematically historically ever been since inception has been top on content. We think that in the next few months we will be rolling out of lot new Yahoo! properties, verticals within the Yahoo! space each of which we believe that will take content creation in surfacing in that particular place to the next level.
Prem comes with 17 years of rich experience in journalism with both print and online medium. As the Managing Editor of Yahoo! India, Prem is responsible for the editorial content for Yahoo! India, across its industry leading properties including- Yahoo! Home Page, Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Movies and Yahoo! Finance amongst others.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Prem was working with Rediff.com for almost 14 years at different positions and was a key member of the startup team of Rediff.com.
He started as an editor at Rediff.com in 1996 and spent seven years at that position. In 2002, he shifted to New York for 4 years to head the company’s American based newspaper for Indian-Americans ‘India Abroad’. In 2003 while in New York he became Editor for Rediff.com India Limited. He returned to India end of 2006 at the same position and worked here till December 2009. Prem has also worked with Sunday Observer, a Sri Lanka based newspaper as senior editor for three years.
Prem is also a renowned cricket writer and blogger. His blogs can be read on: http://prempanicker.wordpress.com/.
Yahoo! is a leading global consumer brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is where millions of people go every day to see what is happening with the people and things that matter to them most. Yahoo! helps marketers reach that audience with its unique and compelling advertiser proposition. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Yahoo! India (www.yahoo.in) was launched in June 2000 and has established itself as leading Internet brand with highly engaging media properties and communication tools. Yahoo! India empowers you and offers a range of products and online tools to discover your world on the Web. Today, we are the market leader in some of the most popular categories in the online space, which includes Mail, Messenger, Movies, News, Finance & Cricket.
Q. In a website, there are situational conflicts for space between ad sales and content etc. Is there a time when you let go off content? How do you deal with that? I really don’t want to mention conflicts that happen in a larger organisation but within Yahoo, from the time I have been a part, we believe that all the partners mesh and interoperability building that we as an organisation kind of function at optimum, if everybody knows what everybody else is doing, we don’t necessarily take a decision from a content perspective or sales perspective. We make a decision from the Yahoo perspective. For example we just launched a microsite for Dove, sales-sales goes out and creates a high traffic section; somebody who, lets say, types cosmetics/beauty probably wants to associate it with entertainment etc and you have banners for stuff like that, and here we are good at creating content, thinking through story lines and narratives and talking through themes and thinking what content suits the theme. We don’t really have content which says XYZ brand is brilliant, you use Dove and your skin glows and whatever happens. But we are going to create content that is ‘themed’ beauty. Generally what does beauty means to you-how much of a co-relation is there between inner beauty and outer beauty and all of that stuff. We have been creating content now as far as space allocation is concerned we have let’s say Saina Nehwal talking about the beauty of sportsperson and that person’s life-how to stay beautiful in adverse condition, even if not concerned with Dove it gives a holistic approach about beauty, we don’t really want to get into debate about content or advertising, if it is a clear advertising pitch then it doesn’t belong to content space. We keep differentiating between content and between advertising content. I give you an example of advertising content that is content anyways, you will probably find that content anywhere in the world, in the lifestyle magazine. What makes you think about the content of the other kind, you know the editorial content. That does not have an advertising implication, somebody putting a banner, so we don’t really bother about what happened typically internally in Yahoo! and we have all these weekly calls where all the section heads are part of it, department heads are part of it, we make sure that everyone else is updated on what the others are doing and all these issues come up there. We don’t have a philosophical conflict.
Q. How important is content for Yahoo!? It’s the game that we have been leaders for the last number of years, why I joined Yahoo! because it has tremendous potential as it completely dominates the content space within India. Globally Yahoo! dominates the whole of lot of countries. Yahoo! is I think the number 1 in-terms of content consumption, domination and leads. I don’t want to comment on the figures, they are all on the public domain. We already know that the content space has historically been dominated by us. People keep asking about Yahoo! Is content crucial but a year from now you wouldn’t have to ask this.
Q. How important is news coming from the wires? We pick up news from the wires, but whatever we think as a news, so here let’s say there is a product launch on the wire, we have particular property coming, that will include a lot of lifestyle products, but there, let’s take a hypothetical example a big brand car launch, carrying the press release is a PR exercise. It might be in the luxury segment, we will probably do a story that concerns the larger universe about the whole industry and where this brand has a role to play, now that is the editorial content. So if you are very clear that what you want to do as a content head and largely as an organisation then issues don’t arise. Arun is very clear in what he will permit and what he will not, Sales has their line in place and we know what we have to.
Q. How is Yahoo! doing on the language front? We currently have Dainik Jagran, and we are so excited by what is happening with this that within the next few months you will find that vernacular is going to play a huge role and we are expanding our languages. For example, in five months, you are going to play World Cup- you come to Yahoo! to see the straight preview, below that you see larger narratives topical blogs, below that what have you had a smart search option; not exactly a search platform that integrates you to some 50 links but 3-4 of the links that relates to the exact same topic and below that- what if you could consume what your language newspaper of choice was actually saying about the match and larger narratives. What if all of that in one space? Like I earlier said, we don’t put things in basket; we work in a basket. So we see in this jigsaw, we begin to get our blogs right, we get opinions right, we are going to launch opinions for cricket as well within a month. We have got some new launches coming up, all of this falls in place you will see a picture which will spell content. But our definition of content is considerably more agnostic, considerably more far reaching than probably the industry developments.
Q. Editors and Sub-Editors are designated at desks. Where do you think Yahoo! gives a chance to the unsung heroes to showcase their talent in a better form? Yahoo! newsroom until very recently was almost like what you mentioned- that people sitting in the content, none of them had any hand in it really etc etc, I have been sitting in Yahoo! for eight months now and have been figuring out the Yahoo! content strategy- what we need to implement, steps from where we are right now and where do we want to see ourselves. For me, content is what I have done all my life. Because Yahoo! is interested and Yahoo! has platform that makes me believe that anything we do will go to far wider an audience. That made up my mind for me. So, you look at any content house, you don’t know who is working there, so now go to Yahoo! you have 15 people working there, you have all of their bylines and it’s all transparent in that blog which we launched in June. A blog can be seen as a niche thing but it can be seen as an attempt to voice the newsroom. We have an idea that where we are going to take the blogs- what kind of news will go out of that blog. Right now we are under training for that. Basically we had an opportunity for the people who have never had a public profile to acquire that and yesterday we were looking at some numbers. After the blogs were launched, we had about 8.6 million page views, there are may be about 20-25 blogs in the world who will play those sort of figures and these are established blogs. This was just in the first month of the operation. Once you give them a voice and a platform, we believe it works. Giving them opportunity to write and page views is half the story. For me content works with touch and feel, they want to engage with it. There has been a day which had 6,00,000 plus page views and all these blogs were by journalists, who were till then were never writing. That is the bet what we play with content. Couple of weeks before launching Yahoo! blogs we launched Yahoo! Opinion. We picked people who are good at what they do, like Deepak Shinoy, who lives on the market, knows what he is talking about.
Q. Is Yahoo! looking at integrating news with social media? No we don’t need to. See the thing is, you have a Facebook account and how is one integrating it? We have integrated that in a blog but we don’t necessarily have to integrate that in a ‘thing’. We will probably at some point, but what we do is we engage people in conversation, these people who are following us and increasingly we are getting followers added on at the rate of about 20 new followers every day. That’s been a recent noticeable trend. We do 2 things: 1- We don’t give them all the stories that are published on Yahoo! that is again plugged with new links that are nothing to do with them, but we throw on topical stories just when people are talking about it, secondly we ask people questions, we listen to their answers, sometimes we use that on our blog. We use that content to showcase and then we are back on the Twitter, we getting traffic from there and Facebook has also become a part of our strategy. We are not building a world garden-that nothing will come from outside and nothing will go out. We are completely an open space. We believe that users need to determine what they will do. And our job is to facilitate that discovery. We make sure the content the user wants is high quality and topical and relevant, but we also make sure that you can consume it in any fashion that you want. Through the medium of the blog, opinion, my job is to provide information; it’s your job to consume content.
Q. Is Yahoo! homepage dependant on subjects like that of bollywood, sex etc? For us internally in editorial, you have the space which is a carousal. Basically the carousal I structured in certain way that you can have four packages uploaded at a time and it has to be multiples of four. That is my FrontPage. Here is the deal that when we make these calls, we see the relevance of the news and add pictures and videos on our front page. When we make choices in the content we make them on the basis of- are they visually driven or not. For instance, videos are going to be a big part of our work going forward, and in this framework you have a choice. If someone goes and takes a video of the common wealth infrastructure, so will you upload the picture over there or will you review the news? So here on the carousal we put a small video. We as a journalist read about Bollywood, so why are we sneering about it. If only Bollywood content sells then I have a problem, but not if the content is balanced. If we thought that Bollywood only sells it then why not, why do I have columnists writing about foreign affairs? Today for instance about international stories, yesterdays was politics. I am clearly saying that Bollywood is not the only thing that sells. Cricket sells, bollywood sells- we need to know what sells and encash on that.
Q. Since they are confined into this, do you plan to give them standalone opportunities? When you start formulating a content strategy, you need to know where you want to be and you need to know what steps you need to take in order to achieve that. Yahoo!’s business has been dominated by aggregation, so we have a lot of content that is aggregated by lot of our partners. We needed to look at every single partner and make a call on business and actually the content that you want. So we started roping in other content providers who we think will create a more engaging bouquet of content, this is one part of the story. Once we have a content in place then the challenge is to surface them in a relevant manner which we can see on the front page; which is where the curation comes in- when we take the multiple elements of content from all our vendors and stick them together, may be through the blogs or may be through a news item. Today whatever is the hot topic, you can go to a newspaper or you can go to a standalone website and you can get what that site has done. Going forward you will come to Yahoo! and know what the entire spectrum of people are talking about- but not in terms of just giving you a lot of links. It’s in terms of summarising, providing precise information that is relevant for the story and then giving you all the tools to dig deeper supplemented by the blog- which is an opinion, supplemented with analysis and insights so that creates a package for you which is content, supplementary content and context. So your content is basically your story itself, supplementary content is something that can be done through the blog- you can go through the entire universe that relates to the content and put it there, but then somebody needs to create a context for that to give it a narrative brain. There is no such thing as standalone, it’s just going out and doing it. You know I started my career at the news desk and that is the place still where I love to be.
Q. Is space an issue when doing something online with Vernacular? No, space is never an issue, Dainik Jagran is sitting at a corner of a Yahoo! front page. If you look at it on the left side you will the Dainik Jagran link it’s getting you millions of page views and millions of users - so it’s about optimizing space, it’s about- do I want to have 10 headlines in 10 languages on my front page? NO. What if I want to have 10 languages attached to every single story, what if I want to create 10 packages? We tend to think that a package needs to be in English…Why? The package could be in English as a lead, but it can have multiple links in different languages for multiple targets. I don’t think space is an issue, I don’t think surfacing and engagement is an issue, I think it’s breaking down that mental barrier that if it goes in vernacular languages do we really want to park it; I think it needs to be upfront. We are a nation of multiple languages- we should be making best use of that.
Q. What kind of stories are important on a particular day for Yahoo!? Yahoo! realizes that there are certain events that will create news. Once the budget is announced- any news room will guarantee you a budget story. So what does an editorial person do? There are people coming in for a specific reason and there are those who are not coming every day. We are just coming here because today we feel- This is important therefore I go there. Likewise for cricket, Yahoo! has cricket content; it’s currently number one in the cricket space, so people are coming for that. Currently out of the 100 per cent cricket space Yahoo! shares a unique users of 47 per cent of unique users and cricinfo is 41 or 42 per cent. People go for cricket on X site, as a company why should it bother you? As long as you can provide compelling content people will come to you too. I don’t expect you as a reader, who comes to Yahoo!, to go nowhere else. I am fine if you got to 50 sites. What I need to ensure is that my site is relevant for you and that you have a reason to come to me. What you do the rest of the time is entirely your business. From June 2009-June 2010, there is a 35 per cent growth on the front page, greater than the market growth. It’s a well organized super market, for instance you come to Yahoo! only for cricket but I will show you five other reasons why you should come to Yahoo! which is apart from cricket. For me a cricket match, or a budget or a release of a new movie or anything is a great market to cross from.
Q. When you revamp your products like emails keeping in mind your competition, do you think that content plays a major role? It’s not relevant for me, Yahoo! as a company, talking about what other people in various places- is not our business. We never ever discuss about any other site when we plan, the minute you start thinking that somebody is doing this and therefore you are doing that, you are thinking is straight jacketed now. What Yahoo! does with its email, or messenger or its products is factor of Yahoo!’s strategy, It’s not necessarily a response to or a reaction to what somebody else is doing. When we take a property- there is a direction that we go on. Like I know what I want Yahoo! to be in the content space, I know what I want Yahoo! to be in 2 years from now on and everything that I am doing is basically planned and conceptualized around that. I don’t compulsively keep checking sites, I do not do it. Keep your focus on what you are doing; don’t worry about what competition is doing. The more you focus on your roadmap the better job you do.
Q. Are you planning to revamp any of your Yahoo! products? All of that is a part of revamping, like we have a new news properties coming up, we have new finance properties coming up, we have lifestyle property coming up, we have properties in the entertainment space coming up. Each of these would be a very strong segment. We are basically creating a bed rock, cricket also we are revamping very soon. Once we have done with all of that, by the first quarter of next year, we will have all these in place. Each of them is a very strong property in themselves. And then what we will do is, we will fine tune it and use the FrontPage to both showcase the product and also as an entry point.
Worldcup is coming in India, and Yahoo! is ICC’s partner, we are pretty much the official partners and the destination. We have been partners for the last seven months. We know right now that by next year February we will be hugely tight in that particular property.
Q. What are the plans in designing Yahoo! content for the coming year? Yahoo! has dominated the content landscape globally for more than 5 years now. Whatever search, mail, or messenger or whatever social media or content, Yahoo! has quietly done a lot of stuff and dominated every single thing. We are number one in mails and we are number one in movies, we are number one in cricket. If media can’t look at Yahoo! as content destination it’s not Yahoo!’s problem- it’s the media’s problem. Yahoo! has systematically historically ever been since inception has been top on content. We think that in the next few months we will be rolling out of lot new Yahoo! properties, verticals within the Yahoo! space each of which we believe that will take content creation in surfacing in that particular place to the next level.
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