Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, that's not that hard. Yeah. I think the huge takeaway and the thing that we forget today in the world of but my job is professionally to try and start new startups, and so all the time I'm going “Well, let me go see what keywords are going for in this category right now as my very first step. ” You know, in the absence of that world existing, we completely forget that it was not apparent that a marketplace for search ads was going to be an incredibly lucrative business. So if you look at the steps that Yahoo took as a business and kind of growing up, Paul Graham has this really great piece about Yahoo called “What Happened to Yahoo?” and sort of points out that they went from being this web directory and then they had to become grown-ups and the way that they did that was where we sort of directionally pointed right now that’s a big company and they decided media where, you know, we’re going to be a media organization. And even though they included search, they were like, “Well, search is sort of just a way to get people to the site but really, we’re a media company that sells these banner ad impressions.” Then Google comes along and they sort of accidentally discover the incredible power of having really, really good search for the first time. Then Overture discovers that second innovation, the first being actually very good search using the PageRank algorithm, the second being the sort of business model of selling paid search ads and oh my God, it’s tens or hundreds times more valuable than anybody thought it was going to be. So then Yahoo very quickly has to try and figure out how do we pull an about face and get into this new really big business that’s even bigger than the media business that we thought we were trying to get into. Yeah. I think this is – if you guys are okay with it – I think this is a great point to jump to What Would Have Happened Otherwise because I’ve been itching all episode to bring this up.…

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