By Dennis K. Berman
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said that her company's
newly reworked search partnership with Microsoft Corp. was
structured to "put more pressure on Microsoft to make the product
better," and that the tax-advantaged status of the company's
scheduled spinoff of Alibaba and other assets was in good
shape.
In a meeting with Wall Street Journal editors in New York, Ms.
Mayer expressed confidence in Yahoo's evolution to a company driven
by mobile and video presentations, and more tightly-integrated
advertising formats.
"'Native' advertising is the fancy word that the digital world
has chosen to put on the fact that the banner ad is not going to
last long-term," Ms. Mayer said.
Referencing banner advertisements that perch on the edges of
desktop computer screens, Ms. Mayer said that "on no other medium
are the advertisements on the edge of the screen. We can't trick
readers but we do want presentation formats that makes readers
engage with the advertisements."
Ms. Mayer also said the company was refocusing on improving its
search capabilities, and its new Microsoft relationship was
designed to enhance that. Under the new deal, Yahoo and Microsoft
can each terminate their agreement starting on October 1. Yahoo
also has latitude to generate more of its own search results,
instead of relying only on search results generated by Microsoft's
Bing search engine.
Ms. Mayer quoted her counterpart CEO, Microsoft's Satya Nadella,
as saying "We have to earn your business every day," noting that
the deal would help both companies get better at their search
capabilities and challenge Google Inc. "Ultimately we want to give
the best possible search experience," Ms. Mayer said.
Despite Ms. Mayer's many acquisitions and strategic shifts, the
Yahoo's revenue has been static since 2011, and the company has
been under intermittent attack from investment activists.
"We engage with constructive dialogue with all shareholders,"
Ms. Mayer said. "What's hard about it as a CEO is you only have a
certain amount of time you can spend with shareholders. I read
somewhere that [Amazon's] Jeff Bezos spends six hours a year with
shareholders. I spend considerably more."
Write to Dennis K. Berman at dennis.berman@wsj.com
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