Yahoo 2000 Annual Report Download - page 17

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Jeff M allett, President and Chief Operating Officer
Operations Review
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Our thanks go out to our consumers, customers, partners,
employees and stockholders for making this year such a
great one for the company. The clear validation of the Web
as the delivery platform of choice for this coming century
contributed to allowing us to make excellent progress
against our stated strategic objectives.
Underlying all of our efforts this past year was the relent-
less focus on providing the “essential” Web services for our
users and business customers around the world.
Some metrics behind our success this year included
strengthening the core franchise brand, currently ranked
No. 38 in the list of the top 40 most valuable, global brands
by an Interbrand study. The company exited the year with a
global audience of more than 180 million users, consuming
over 900 million page views per day on average in December
and spending more than 1hour and 58 minutes per month
on the Yahoo! network of properties. Yahoo!’s network grew
to encompass 24 countries in which we have a direct opera-
tional presence, in 12 different languages. Our global
marketing services efforts were well rewarded as we saw
revenue grow 88 percent, topping $1 billion in 2000. One of
the key drivers of this success was the strong retention rate
of our top clients. At year end, more than 93 percent of our
top 200 advertisers that contracted with us in the first half
of 2000, continued campaigns in the second half of the
year. Along with a healthy flow of traditional companies
coming on to the network, including 27 of the Fortune 50,it
has become apparent that our marketing services are more
essential to our top 200 customers, as we saw the average
contract length for this group increase to 305 days.
Business services for the company continued to grow, as
we welcomed 18 clients to our Corporate Yahoo! enterprise
services, and provided a comprehensive and very valuable
store platform for 13,000 merchants hosting their business-
es on the Yahoo! network. During the year we introduced
numerous “for-pay” consumer and business services,
creating an even more compelling environment for our
paying customers.
As we enter our seventh year, the company is in the best
position to capture the massive opportunity in front of us. In
order to be successful, we will need to deliver on the key val-
ues and business practices that took a part-time university
project and turned it into one of the fastest -growing compa-
nies in the history of American business. As we look
forward, it is necessary to keep the challenging market con-
ditions and external economic and business in perspective,
however, our proven ability to rapidly adapt to the changing
environment will serve us well as we blend opportunity with
reality. One thing you can continue to count on is that we will
not only successfully manage through this, but also stay on
course towards our goal of building the worlds leading inter-
active consumer and business services company.
Thank you,
Jeff Mallett
President & COO