During an investor call following Yahoo’s Q3 earnings report Monday afternoon, Marissa Mayer, the company’s new CEO and a former Google exec, outlined her vision for the company going forward. “We’ll become a growth company by inspiring and delighting our users,” Mayer said, borrowing a cliche from the modern startup playbook. Here are five things that she’s focusing on:
Turn Yahoo into a mobile company
“Yahoo hasn’t capitalized on the mobile opportunity,” Mayer said: Yahoo has “underinvested in” mobile, “splintered our brand” and has “more than 76 apps across Android and iOS. All of this needs to change,” because mobile is “a fundamental and massive platform shift that we have to ride and participate in in order to be relevant.” So a “focused, coherent mobile strategy” is the company’s “top priority.”
Mayer says Yahoo has a good foundation in mobile, citing the most frequent uses of smartphones: “Checking the weather, checking sports scores, stocks and financial info, watching videos, sharing photos, getting the latest news, playing games. Does that sound like any particular company that you know? Yahoo, with its content and leadership in these key verticals, is already very well-positioned here.”
Search or display? Both
Asked whether search or display is a bigger priority for Yahoo, Mayer first said “there is potentially more upside in search” because “the content investment we’ve made yields so many impressions and page views.” But then she said “given the trend toward audience-based buying in the advertising space, the display opportunity is particularly compelling.” She said that advertisers tell her “the way audiences tend to congregate on Yahoo is unique” and “we have a great segmentation of audience already,” whereas competitors are either “much less granular or more granular.”
She wants to compete with Google on search share: “There are a few large players and Yahoo should be one.”
Find content and tech partners
Don’t expect “a giant pivot,” Mayer said. Rather, she wants to focus on “improved execution and seeing the opportunities that are already apparent in our business.” Yahoo should be “a terrific compoany to partner with, not only for our advertisers but for other technology companies…We don’t have as much channel conflict with other players in technology as many comparable companies.” So they’ll partner with “browsers, social networks, mobile operating systems.” She later said “one of the advantages here is we don’t have a mobile operating system” so the company will “provide our products across all the different platforms.”
Make more small acquisitions
“One of the things lost on people is that because so many high-profile tech acquisitions are above the $ 1 billion mark, people tend to think all are in that space,” Mayer said. “Many and most are less than $ 100 million” and she’s overseen “20 or so” of those over her career. So “we’re looking for smaller-scale acquisitions that align well overall with our business…the size and scale that’s comfortable for a great integration and great product coming out of it are…in size and scale of double-digit millions and low hundreds of millions.”
Selective international and local expansion
Yahoo has to “bring a coherence to our offerings across different markets” and “narrow it,” Mayer said. The company pulled out of South Korea on Friday. “We had a hard time finding a growth story moving forward” in Korea, Mayer said. But “Korea has been an unusual exception…we will stay where we see opportunities for growth on desktop or mobile” and “withdraw where we don’t see growth.”
“I really do love” local, Mayer said, but she has “a deep respect that it’s very hard to do it well. It requires deep investment, a lot of people, energy and time to build terrific listings.”
