Yahoo! and Media Technology

A pretty good article in the NYTimes today on Yahoo. It's mostly a status report, noting how Yahoo is focused on media more than technology. This isn't really news to most of us, but there were a few nuggets of info in there:

• In December, Yahoo had 103M unique visitors. Nice.


• Yahoo is adding 220 employees per month, and now has over 10k employees


• Yahoo has over 420M registered users. Very impressive.

Yahoo has made some very smart purchases over the past couple of years. The author of the article makes the following points:

Mr. Semel and his Yahoo colleagues are most eager to encourage their registered users, who represent roughly 40 percent of the one billion people now online globally, to create their own content. Yahoo executives say that social networks, blogs, message boards and sites where users from around the world share material — like the recent Yahoo acquisitions Flickr, a photo-sharing business, and Del.icio.us, where people swap information on favorite Web sites and other things — are the keys to a fast-emerging media market.

Both of the companies mentioned, Flickr and Del.icio.us, came with a huge install base of users, which adds to their reach. It's a fantastic strategy...I hope it continues to work for them.

And of course, I would add Konfabulator to the list of smart acquisitions!

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