Yahoo intends to focus on emerging markets like India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brazil to attract more users, said company cofounder David Filo during a visit this week to India. In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday with IDG News Service, Filo said that Yahoo will continue to expand in various countries, even those that do not have democratic governments, as it believes that the Internet and some of Yahoo's products could be agents of change. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
IDGNS: How significant are emerging markets for Yahoo in terms of revenue?
Filo: Today our reach is 500 million users around the globe, and as we think about where the next 500 million users are going to come from, that is all going to come from the new markets. We are not going to get them from the U.S., U.K., or Japan. I think that the revenue is obviously going to lag behind the usage, but in our view, eventually the revenue will follow. It may take many years. I don't know how many years it is going to be, whether it will be 5, 10, 15, or 20 years. But we know that eventually it is going to be very significant. Places like India are starting to show interesting revenue growth. Advertising is starting to come online in a fairly big way. We don't know when, but we know [India] is going to be a billion-dollar market and beyond, and we want to be well-positioned when it happens.
IDGNS: As you move to emerging markets, you also encounter different government rules. In China, for example, Yahoo is accused of supplying information on dissidents to the government. In hindsight do you think this could have been handled differently?
Filo: A lot about what our products and services have been, a lot about what Yahoo has been as a company -- our employees, our mission, the ideals that we have as a company -- have been around openness, inclusiveness, and comprehensiveness to show all points of view. When we go into other places where unfortunately not all governments have that same point of view, we don't feel like we are going to change governments overnight. We are not going to be able to do that as one company.
As we look around the globe, there are plenty of places where those governments don't necessarily have the same ideals that we do, and that is not just China. If someone asks us not to do business in countries that don't necessarily meet those ideals, I think we would be pointing to a lot of countries today. In our mind, that is not useful to anybody long term. It is not useful for us. We don't believe it is useful for the consumer. Actually, we believe that the Internet, in terms of these types of issues, is the one thing that will change the governments to eventually open up, and come to the realization that they need to support freedom of expression and things like that.
The more ubiquitous the Internet is, the more power the individual has, the more information they have in their hands, and the more they can express themselves. These are powerful things that are going to change these governments, and for that reason, we want to be in these markets. We don't want to be out of these markets because we think our products and services, things like Yahoo Answers, are going to be positive to social change.
IDGNS: Does it worry you that Google's revenue in the last quarter was about double that of Yahoo's revenue?
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