Yahoo 2007 Annual Report Download - page 5

Part I
Item 1. Business
Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (“Yahoo!,” the “Company,” “our,” “we,” or “us”), is a
leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on
powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences
built on trust. We seek to provide Internet services that are essential and relevant to these communities of users,
advertisers, publishers, and developers. Publishers, such as eBay Inc. (“eBay”), WebMD, Cars.com, Forbes.com,
and the Newspaper Consortium (our strategic partnership with a consortium of over 20 leading United States
(“U.S.”) newspaper publishing companies), are a subset of our Affiliates and are primarily Websites and search
engines that attract users by providing content of interest, presented on Web pages that have space for
advertisements.
To users, we provide owned and operated online properties and services (“Yahoo! Properties,” “Offerings,” or
“Owned and Operated sites”). We also extend our marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo!
Properties through our distribution network of third-party entities (referred to as “Affiliates”) who have integrated
our advertising offerings into their Websites (referred to as “Affiliate sites”) or their other offerings.
Our offerings to users currently fall into five categories — Front Doors; Search; Communications and Commu-
nities; Media; and Connected Life. The majority of our offerings are available in more than 20 languages.
We focus on expanding our communities of users and deepening their engagement on Yahoo! Properties to enhance
the value of our users to advertisers and publishers and thereby increase the spending of advertisers through our
Owned and Operated and Affiliate sites. We believe that we can expand our communities of users by offering
compelling Internet services and effectively integrating search, community, personalization, and content to create a
powerful user experience. We leverage our user relationships and the social community the users create to enhance
our online advertising potential, as well as our fee-based services.
To advertisers and publishers, we provide a range of marketing solutions and tools that enable businesses to reach
users who visit Yahoo! Properties and our Affiliate sites.
To developers, we provide an innovative and easily accessible array of Web Services and Application Programming
Interfaces (“APIs”), technical resources, tools, and channels to market.
We generate revenues by providing marketing services to advertisers across a majority of Yahoo! Properties and
Affiliate sites. Additionally, although many of our user services are free, we do charge for a range of premium
services that we offer. We classify these revenues as either marketing services or fees revenues.
Yahoo! was developed and first made available in 1994 by our founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, while they were
graduate students at Stanford University. We were incorporated in 1995 and are a Delaware corporation. We are
headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and have offices in more than 20 countries, provinces, or territories in
which Yahoo! conducts business by offering products or services to local audiences.
Yahoo! has embarked on a transformation to meet the needs of our users, advertisers, publishers, and developers.
From our original goal as a guide to the Web, our goal today is to build the most open, robust, and vibrant online ad
network on the Web to reach the largest and most engaged community of online users. We are currently focusing on
three primary strategic multi-year objectives that will be the core of our strategy and operations for the next few
years: become the starting point for users on the Internet; establish Yahoo! as the “must buy” for advertisers; and
deliver industry-leading platforms that attract developers.
Management and Board of Directors Changes
During 2007, we made key changes to our executive leadership. Our Board of Directors (the “Board”) appointed
Jerry Yang, Yahoo! co-founder and long-time board member, to succeed Terry Semel as Chief Executive Officer.
The Board also named Susan Decker as President and Blake Jorgensen, co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, as
Chief Financial Officer. Terry Semel served as non-executive Chairman of the Board until January 31, 2008. Roy
Bostock was elected to serve as non-executive Chairman of our Board on January 31, 2008. Aristotle Balogh joined
the Company as our new Chief Technology Officer on February 6, 2008 to lead Yahoo!’s global engineering
organization and manage all technical operations.
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