This is Kamla Bhatt. We bring you part 2 of our conversation with Ninja Srinivasan, Editor-in-Chief at Yahoo! Inc. Here is Ninja.
Kamla: Yahoo early on went ahead with this decision to get an editorial team. So, you were known as an…
Ninja: “Ontologist” or I was “Ontological Yahoo!”
Kamla: Yes. So, how has that decision-that early decision influenced Yahoo’s competitive advantage in the changing landscape, where we have gone from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0?
Ninja: Yes, I think it has actually held a very interesting place. I think this role, this editorial role and this policy-making a role has held a very interesting place in the
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broader organization. I would like to think that it has been critical to our success. It has been a great driver for long term value because the kind of things that I and my team focus on are what standards and practices are going to demonstrate our brand at its best. And why does that matter? It is not just for the commercial reasons of brand building which are in themselves very important. But in this medium trust is absolutely essential. It is the bedrock. We live and die by whether our users trust us. In the early days we had a tag line contest inviting users to submit their entries for a marketing tagline for Yahoo! And one of the tag lines that Jerry picked up early on and never failed to remind us of was one person told us Yahoo also stands for ”you always have other options”. And that is a very humbling thing to remember and many many, years later of course I keep it in mind. Because our competitors and the alternative is just one click away. There is nothing magic or forced about a user coming to Yahoo. It is a choice and every single time they come it is a choice. It is a URL they type in the box and it is a link they choose to click. So, what keeps engagement and what gives us the right to develop an ongoing relationship and develop these products and services and be a real value is that we start with a foundation of trust. So things like our standards and practices and content, things like responsible data use and transparency and choice in our privacy policy, things like being inclusive in our accessibility efforts and our corporate responsibility arm. All of these things go to establishing and re-upping on that foundation of trust and goodwill that we have thankfully built over the time.
Kamla: So do you find yourself talking to newspaper associations, editors on how they create their policies and standards and norms?
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