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SCMP Reporter

Searching for 'Jerry Yang' at Yahoo!, the popular directory to the World-Wide Web co-founded three years ago by the 29-year-old Chinese-American returns only seven Web sites.

 That is ironic - Yahoo! (www. yahoo.com) lists about a million Web sites, all picked and sorted into one of 200,000 categories by a Yahoo! employee with the weirdly athletic-sounding job title, 'surfer'.

 But then, Mr Yang's business card proudly lists him as 'Chief Yahoo'.

 Like his 25-year-old counterpart at Netscape, Mark Andreessen, Mr Yang is his company's designated evangelist and public persona, chosen because he resonates with Silicon Valley culture, which lionises and rewards smart 20-something engineers with an original idea like Mr Yang.

 The cliche goes that all the coolest computer firms in Silicon Valley are founded in a garage. Three years ago, Mr Yang helped create Yahoo! while in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University.

 Ostensibly working towards a PhD in computer science, Mr Yang was spending most of his time golfing, watching sumo wrestling, and creating a list of favourite Web sites with his buddy and fellow graduate student, David Filo.

 Mr Yang jokes that he was so indolent that if he had not left to found Yahoo!, he would 'probably still be there' in the trailer.

 He and Mr Filo left because their ever-growing list, which started life with the homely title 'David and Jerry's Guide to the World-Wide Web', was attracting thousands of visitors and interest from venture capitalists.

 It may seem a curious medium when the directory itself reigns supreme. But Web guides like Yahoo! fill a strong need.

 The Web essentially is a huge pool of information, a sort of living library. However, because the Web is always growing, it is a dense mess, lacking even a semblance of organisation.

 Essentially a Yellow Pages for the Internet, Yahoo! organised Web sites in categories and sub-categories that simplified user searches.

 Unlike search engines like Alta Vista, where you first need to know what you want to find, Yahoo! made it easy to browse at leisure for information, even if the categories themselves sometimes were a bit subjective.

 Yahoo! draws 25.4 million Americans per month, according to MediaMark Research, more than competitors like America Online and Netscape.

 To compare it with other media, Yahoo!'s audience would be larger than many American cable television channels, and greater than the per-issue readership of leading United States magazines.

 This audience is why Yahoo! will pull in an expected US$60 million in advertising revenue this year. Not a huge amount - especially compared with the company's capitalisation of more than US$2 billion.

 Yahoo!'s $60 million will nevertheless take nearly 10 per cent of all the money that will be spent on Internet advertising this year. And by 2002, Internet advertising is projected to grow to a $7.7 billion business, according to industry analysts Jupiter Communications.

 After various rounds of venture capital funding, Yahoo! went public in April 1996.

 Those Internet ad figures, coupled with Yahoo!'s immense popularity, helped the company earn its market capitalisation - giving Mr Yang a paper net worth of $150 million.

 Along the way, the company acquired what Mr Yang, poking fun at the company's youthful employees, calls a 'real CEO' named Tim Koogle. Mr Filo remains Yahoo!'s chief technical officer.

 Even with its new-found wealth, Yahoo! has spent rather conservatively - it reported a profit in the most recent quarter even as it has aggressively added a whole raft of money-making services - some publishing-related, some not - to its flagship directory.

 One, Yahooligans!, is a directory of Web sites for kids. Yahoo! Finance has information for investors. Yahoo! also has created more than 20 directories localised around a particular American city or foreign country.

 These Web guides are competing head-on for advertising dollars with newspapers and magazines.

 Yahoo!'s most successful guide has been in Japan. Fully localised with Japanese Web sites in Japanese language, Yahoo! Japan expects to report revenues of $9.6 million and profits of $1.1 million this year.

 Yahoo! also recently launched Korean and Australian sites, complete with listings of the countries' Web sites.

 Yahoo! also has launched a Singapore mirror site (www.yahoo. com.sg) of Yahoo!'s main US directory.

 The site currently only duplicates the content of the US site, though local partners, including the South China Morning Post, will help market and localise the Asian site.

 With Yahoo! in Asia, the company hopes to enter this nascent market early. Internet advertising in Asia totalled $2.59 million last year, according to Jupiter Communications, though that is projected to grow to $300.28 million by 2000.

 Yahoo! also plans to create a directory of Chinese-language Web sites next year. Mr Yang said the content at Chinese-language sites had 'got a lot more rich since a year ago'.

 He said he did not use Chinese-language Web directories often. 'A lot of them aren't as comprehensive as I'd like them to be. But it's the same criticism I have about my own product.'  The site will be located in northern California rather than Asia for two reasons. First, it is still often faster for a Hong Kong person to surf to a US Web site than a Singaporean one, for example, Mr Yang said.

 Second, locating the site in the US helps Yahoo! avoid sticky political issues, for example, mainland-Taiwan relations.

 'We may or may not be able to get around it, because they can shut us off,' he said. 'The point there is to take a very neutral stand. I don't know if we can get away with it. We are already running into problems.'  Mr Yang, whose Chinese name is Yang Chih-yuan, was born in Taiwan. His father, a mainland native, died when Jerry was two years old.

 When Jerry was 10, his mother, an English professor, moved him and his younger brother Ken from Taiwan to San Jose, in the heart of the Silicon Valley.

 He was mobbed by people on a trip back to Taiwan 18 months ago. Was it over-eager mothers hoping to set up their daughters with Mr Yang? No, just the 'aggressive media'. But, he laughed, it 'would've been nice', his recent marriage notwithstanding.

 Yahoo! even publishes a print magazine called Yahoo! Internet Life, in a joint venture with computer magazine publisher, Ziff Davis.

 Mr Yang prefers to liken Yahoo! to a publishing company, despite the recent rage to describe the Web using television metaphors like 'channels' and 'multicasting'.

 'Whether we like it or not, and I like it, the Web is 90 per cent text. Certainly, what Yahoo! serves up is text - text with graphics embellishment.'  Adding to Yahoo!'s publishing focus is Mr Yang's belief that Yahoo! will succeed pretty much on ad revenue alone, without much in the way of revenue from Internet shopping.

 'We're not in the merchant business ourselves. I don't ever want to sell books myself.

 'The more we help them [retailers] succeed, the more money will come back in terms of advertising.'  But does that mean Yahoo! plans to take issues like editorial integrity and freedom of speech as seriously as other publishers?  'We have taken a fairly strong philosophy of not censoring,' he said. But, he said, Yahoo! also takes 'the local philosophy of not breaking the law'.

 Mr Yang notes that in Singapore, it is local Internet service providers, not Web content providers and aggregators like Yahoo!, which are legally bound to monitor and block access to users.

 Like Yahoo!, Microsoft Network, and CNET, the firms most aggressively attempting to become the Internet equivalents of CNN and Time-Warner, all subscribe to the same theory.

 As more people get on to the Web, only a few leading sites will be able to leverage their brand name to draw significant viewership and significant ad dollars, while the majority of lesser-known Web sites compete for scraps.

 Mr Yang said the nature of the Internet publishing business is that Yahoo's main competitor, Microsoft, also is its occasional partner.

 Regarding allegations of Microsoft's monopolistic behaviour, Mr Yang said that 'when we work with Microsoft, they do try to carve out what you can do with them, and what you can't do with other people.

 'But as long as it's not tied to the OS [operating system], it's standard practice. It's what we do. If you want to work with us, we tell you not to work with Excite! [a competing Web directory]'.

 The ultimate goal for Yahoo!'s marketers is to become not just a brand, but to be perceived as part of a youthful and hip lifestyle.



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