Yahoo! News reached 40 million unique users per month recently. Today I was sitting around the conference with my co-workers chewing the fat.
I was telling them that in my mind, we are at a second phase of Yahoo! News. It’s a phase of large numbers.In the next 3-5 years we can grow to 80 million unique users per month and with that scale, we should think about our influence in a different scale. Imagine that every year we have about 5 breaking news events like earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, presidential elections, we may reach about twice that number of people. Then every 5 years we may have world shattering events like a tragic school shooting, like a 9/11 type of event, an assassination (I’m a sort of morbid) our user base could grow 10 fold or 20 fold.
When we think in large numbers, there are many parts of our distribution network that we can extend. What if we built a distribution network to place real time election results, or real time breaking news to allow bloggers to distribution that information. What if we were one of the only news sites that can scale to handle 100 fold traffic during a 9/11 type of event. What if 1/4 of the world needed to know about a catastrophe at the same time, would Yahoo! News step up and serve them? What if we could serve 500 million people, how about 1 billion people?
Dream big guys.
Tony Tam 