Yahoo 1998 Annual Report Download - page 16

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I’m proud to report that 1998 was another successful year for Yahoo!. In 1998,
we continued to carefully manage the business and invest in aggressively
growing our leadership position while delivering consistently increasing profits
on a pro forma basis, and value to our users, customers, and shareholders. We
built an increasingly stronger business by anticipating, affecting, and adapting
to the remarkable growth and changes in the industry. As the Internet has
grown and changed, so has Yahoo!, with our foremost focus being on serving
the needs of our customers worldwide.
Since the formation of Yahoo!, we have been relentless in building Yahoo! into
the only place anyone in the world would have to go to find and get connected
to anything or anybody. It encompasses a broad vision and allows us numerous
ways to aggressively grow our business. As an independent, comprehensive
global branded network of Web properties and services, Yahoo! is a leader in
delivering the widest choice of content and services available to Internet users.
We have built a powerful platform used by advertisers, merchants, and content
providers to reach large, targeted audiences to grow their businesses in part-
nership with us. Yahoo! is the provider of choice when users, advertisers, and
merchants want to find, buy, sell, or send something on the Web.
We have always been very focused on acquiring and retaining as large and as
broad a global audience as possible. By strategic choice, we have remained
independent with regard to the content or merchant services we aggregate on
behalf of our worldwide users. Users highly value choice, and our unique posi-
tion is that of the independent, open aggregator of anything and everything
users could want to find and get connected to.
The core of our strategy has been to build a platform business that satisfies
the needs of the largest global audience possible, and in a way that has Yahoo!
increasingly woven into their lives. We have always reasoned that if we were to
be successful in doing this, we would have millions of people coming to Yahoo!
on a daily basis, showing us exactly what they found most popular. We would
then use actual consumption patterns to address their needs for content,
merchant services, and communication services. The result is a powerful, self-
reinforcing distribution platform for an ever-increasing array of content,
communication services, and merchant services. It also drives a great business
model when well managed.
1998 results
It’s very much an understatement when I say that the industry has grown and
changed a lot during 1998! By analyst measurements, in 1998 the number of
regular Web users grew to 142 million and the total dollars spent on Web
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