Taipei Times: Yahoo-Kimo Taiwan (雅虎奇摩) reported 20 percent growth in ad sales for the first half of this year over the same period last year. Is this a sign that the Internet business is rebounding?
Rose Tsou (
Although this year everybody has much stronger growth, the percentage didn't rise. But in general, it's a good sign when we started seeing advertisers more and more willing to spend online.
TT: What's Yahoo Taiwan's income forecast for this year?
Tsou: Last year our market share of the Taiwan Internet advertisement sales pie was more than 40 percent and this year we expect to maintain a similar market share. Total Internet ad sales last year in Taiwan was about NT$800 million. We believe we will be able to expand the pie a little bit in 2002. As for the breakdown, we anticipate our revenue stream for 2002 will be over 20 percent coming from non-advertising revenue.
TT: With ads sales closely tied to the economic climate, isn't it too risky to rely on ads that much?
Tsou: Yes, if the business is solely dependent on ads sales I would definitely say yes. [And actually] that is exactly the direction Yahoo-Kimo has been headed. But we don't want ads to become our only media strength -- we want to be able to balance them with the other income sources.
However, that does not mean Yahoo-Kimo doesn't believe that Internet ad sales will continue to be a major source of revenue. We are sure it's worth every effort to push the envelope.
TT: What new ideas do you have to diversify your income sources?
Tsou: We are doing two things simultaneously. One is we are continuing to build our advertisement platform, making sure Yahoo-Kimo is going to be the strongest and most effective marketing platform for any advertiser.
On the other hand, we are also adding premium services which will bring additional revenue. Premium services are those we offer or cooperate on with external partners that users subscribe to. Those can be, for example, extra space for e-mail accounts, express search directories or fortuneteller services.
The second sector is more e-commerce related like shopping, online trading or selling insurance online.
TT: Where will non-advertising revenue come from?
Tsou: That's very fragmentary. I would tend to believe the premium services will probably make up the higher share.
In the long run, I believe overall the company will be able to see combined ad and non-ad revenue grow to the 50 percent range in the next two years. That is the Yahoo worldwide goal and Yahoo-Kimo absolutely wants to follow that as much as we can.
Hopefully, after we carefully develop and maintain relationships with premium customers, we will be able to not rely so much on Internet ad sales.
TT: Your competitor, PC Home.com (網路家庭), is reporting a certain percentage of revenue from e-commerce. What are Yahoo-Kimo's plans in this area?
Tsou: E-commerce is set to be a big area of our [goal of achieving] 50 percent non-ads sales in addition to premium services such as search directories or add-on value content. We all understand selling computer electronics in Taiwan, the margin is very limited to less than 10 percent.
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