Trends Hut

The interview took place in front of an audience. Here are Bartz's thoughts, edited for length and clarity:

A: Social does not just equal Facebook. Social is how people interact anywhere. During the State of the Union address last January, we had so many people commenting the first couple hours that our site went down. That's a social interaction. E-mail is a social experience.

What I don't like is when somebody says, "The only way you find social is (the way Facebook operates)." Did we miss the boat on exactly how they do it? Of course we did. Everybody did.

A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that's valuable.

A: Yes, creepy. I don't care to find an old boyfriend. One time, just to see if they got fat and bald, but then leave me alone. But I'm old.

A: Too much of the advertising (on the Internet) is static and feels old-fashioned. So we like to work with the advertisers to say, "Let's kind of get in there and mix it up. Let's get people jolted awake again."

One of my favorites: Purina Puppy Chow has a little puppy walking across the top of the screen. I sit there like an idiot because it's cute, and I happen to like puppies. It drags the bowl. When Disney did their advertising for Alice in Wonderland you went to the front page, you open it up and this hole appears and you are sucked into it and you are in Wonderland. People clicked on that ad four and five times to replay it. It was fun.

A: You can click on any of these and say, "Don't show me this."

A: Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.

But we have something called an Ad Interest Manager. You can say, "Don't ever show me an ad again" or "Don't show me this kind of ad or that kind of ad." Less than 1% of the people elect not to.

A: If people really don't want ads, they can go find their information however it is they want. It's a free world on that matter. What I'm saying is, I don't think you want bad ads.

A: If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple. I don't think it is for us to say this ad isn't pretty enough and to go through this whole back-end process of approval. I don't think in the long run that's going to work. Advertisers will have other options.

A: Yes. Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready — even when things are going well — to change. In the case of a company as large as Yahoo (you have) to be honest about its shortcomings and be maniacal about how to get it better.

A: It's both. You have a freshness of having new eyes, but you also don't have the grounding. So you have to accommodate that with listening, learning, being willing to ask questions that might appear to be less than brilliant, and enjoying the business.

I would never do anything that I didn't enjoy. That's the whole thing. I couldn't go run a fruit business. That wouldn't do it for me. As long as you are inspired by it, you can learn anything.

A: I hire very high-level people, and so you are really checking to make sure they have a cultural fit and that sort of thing.

When you are talking about hiring somebody in their first, second, third job, you really are looking for excitement, some humbleness. So: eagerness to learn, eagerness to be involved in whatever the company is doing — and being willing to do the work you have to do at entry level.

A: Go talk to people at all levels in the organization and honestly ask their opinion. If you sit there quiet and interested, it comes out.

A: Yes. I don't shoot people. In fact, I would shoot people that wouldn't take a risk.

Somebody showed me a slide to prove they were risk-taking and the top of the slide said "calculated risk." So I said, "OK, you already know it is going to work, right?" "Oh, yes, it will work." That's not a risk. That's just not a risk.

A: There's a whole lot of interesting tectonic plates moving around. When you have a nice, large screen, there's a lot you can do with it. And Yahoo wants to be there.

A: It is not a slam-dunk. There's a lot of cable companies that want that business. There's a lot of TV makers that want Internet applications. So it is pretty hard whenever there's a new market forming to say, "Oh, that's the leader." It takes awhile to settle out.

A: There's different kinds of video. If you are asking me whether the half-hour (TV) show and the hour show is going to be all consumed on the Internet, I don't think (that will happen) for a long time. It is going to take awhile to overcome the foothold that cable has.

A: There's 220 million websites, not 220 channels. It's too much. You want to have a place where you can trust what the news is or trust what sports is and get your job done.

A: We have that now, in a way. We have updates on Tech Ticker, one of our most popular shows. We have Primetime in No Time, which basically tells you in three, four minutes everything that happened in prime time. We have Daytime in No Time, which tells you what happened on all your soaps and Oprah and all that.

People flood to that stuff because who has got time to look at all of it? And those three- and five-minute video shows are very popular with the advertisers.

A: That exists in New York City and about 30 miles outside Silicon Valley. The rest of the world seems to know.

Yahoo is the largest media company in the world. We are twice as large as the nearest competitor. We do it through innovative technology and bringing people information they need to manage their lives. We serve up — and these numbers I hope will astound you — 10 billion ads a day.

A: There's three big places that people go on the Internet: Facebook, Yahoo, Google. We play to our strengths, which by definition means we have weaknesses in other areas.

A: I'm off the grading thing. I'm just going to declare that we are pass-fail, and I pass.

A: Let me answer a question you didn't ask. Am I the perfect person for the job at Yahoo? No. Am I good for the job? Yes.

A: Was there the word "economist" on my business card?

A: Of course you do. Now let me be serious. Last year, we said, by the third or fourth quarter of 2010, things will be better. This year, we are saying, by the third or fourth quarter of 2011.

We can't seem to get stability around employment, housing — all those issues that are making consumers less confident than they should be.

To be honest, we don't understand what goes on in Washington. A lot of rules keep changing. That erodes confidence. It is far from a healthy, vibrant economy.

A: I am actually a very private political person, so I would not like to comment on that.

A: I'm voting for Meg and Carly, absolutely.

A: We all live in a place. You live in small communities, and you are very interested in what happens in those communities from police blotters to what happened in the city council or the neighborhood watch. It is interesting to the consumer.

And it is interesting to the advertiser because it is the ultimate target. Statistics are 95% of our purchases are (made) within 2 miles of our house, 5 miles of our house.

A: We have partnerships with local publications and an association with newspapers. They send us news feeds. We send viewers back to their dot-com locations. So we actually are very symbiotic with people like that.

But to answer more the spirit of your question, why can we succeed? I will give you the CEO answer: We do a better job. A better job in being a partner with local advertisers. A better job partnering with people actually writing from the community, not about the community. We have a lot of experience in this.

A: Everybody should have equal access (to the Internet). But we have to work out a system whereby folks that laid fiber and put the (broadband) infrastructure in get value for that.

I'm not sure that I'm smart enough to figure the answer out. But I don't think that two companies, or just the government, get to decide. People have to come to the table, get off the end positions and be more practical.

A: I think so.

A: Of course. Listen, anything that can protect our children from bad people, we have to do.

A: I would have no problem with that.

A: We not only license news feeds (for example from Reuters and the Associated Press), we also have our own editorial voice. We have human editors watching what seems to be interesting people, and feature that more prominently. So we are constantly tweaking what is delivered.

For instance, on our front page we have a module called "Today," which is what's happening. Every five minutes we serve up 32,000 different variations depending on what you seem to be interested in. So it is very personal. It is engaging.

Then we just bought a company called Associated Content: 380,000 writers, bloggers, in all the towns and cities who also contribute to this news feed. So it is a combination of what people can do and what machines can do.

A: Absolutely. Listen, just because enough people weren't reading about the oil spill, we wouldn't pull it off the page. That's again what editors are for, that's what people's brains are for, to make those kind of judgment calls.

A: Yes. We are neither the left voice nor the right voice. We try to be the center voice.

We are just selecting news that people actually have liked to read about. It is not our job to round people out. It is our job to be balanced and have a voice that is balanced and is dependable and trustworthy.

A: We try not to antagonize our advertisers. Please, we never want to antagonize you. And we are careful. For instance, we have very, very intense technology that scans for nudity and bad words.

But when you have as many users as we do, almost 170 million in the U.S., everybody has opinions and (some) tell me that we should not have written this story and that story. But it isn't about doing something untrustworthy.

A: What I like is the technology and how we can serve up information that, while we are global brand, feels very local and personal.

A: We are just neck and neck with Google for mobile installations in the U.S. We don't have an operating system, but we have Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Finance — all those things. Mobile is huge for us, especially in emerging parts of the world where the only on-ramp to the Internet is going to be through a small screen. They are not going to have a desktop or laptop at home. But for the developed world, I don't think you are going to let this (small) size screen be the only ramp on to the Internet.

A: It isn't Google that gets to do that: It is what the carrier wants to do. By the way, there are many instances around the world where what comes up are Yahoo applications, not Google applications, even on an Android phone. The only one that actually controls that precisely is Apple.