Yahoo! has seen a number of changes over the past year — acquisitions, revamps and even a new logo. Yvonne Chang, Managing Director — India and South-East Asia at Yahoo, talked about the ongoing changes, its current market status, business plans in India and requests for sharing of user data from security agencies, in an emailed interview to Business Line. Excerpts:
Have the changes made over the last one year helped bring in new users?
Yahoo! is focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. We identified around 12-15 such products (used daily) – including Mail, News, Sports, Flickr, Answers, Groups, Homepage. The Flickr (photo sharing platform) re-design in May and our ‘unboxed’ Yahoo! Mail experience have driven up the daily (active) mobile mail users by 120 per cent, and our overall mobile traffic to 390 million (in a year) from 200 million. At the same time, our total global users have gone up from 700 million to 800 million.
Globally, we are No.2 since December 2012 and No.1 in the US. In the last quarter, Yahoo! Mail on mobile saw a 20 per cent growth globally. Yahoo! Mail is the second largest email service provider in India.
How is Yahoo! competing with Google or Microsoft (in India)?
In December last year, Yahoo! had a product upgrade which made it faster, easier, and safer. Yahoo! Mail became the only service to have native apps for iOS, Android and Windows phones. We also launched Yahoo! Mail apps for tablet PCs which contributed to a 120 per cent increase in daily active users across the application. We partnered with Dropbox for easy management of large attachments.
Recently, we re-designed Yahoo! Mail for desktops, iOS, Android and Windows 8. This includes better themes, threaded conversations, and (increased) 1TB (capable of holding around 50 million average sized e-mails) free storage. Enhanced navigation and deletion of messages have also been enabled.
How big is the Indian market?
India is an important market, especially when the Internet is fast growing. A majority of the audience is young, and mobiles are a big draw. This is what Yahoo! is targeting. Today, we reach around 60 per cent of the Internet audience in India.
What are your growth drivers?
Our key growth drivers are mobile, video, entertainment and communication products.
In the last one year, we have launched a slew of offerings on the mobile front that include mails, Flickr , and weather (updates). Our mobile traffic across India has grown by 54 per cent during this period.
Do you share information with government agencies?
Yahoo! has joined no programme to volunteer user data to governments. Our legal department demands that government data requests be made through lawful means for lawful purposes. We regularly push back against improper requests. Data requests have been made between January and June 2013 by governments of 17 countries in the US, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Europe, as per Yahoo!’s first Transparency Report released recently.
The governments include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France and India, among others. These are the countries in which Yahoo! has a legal entity, and therefore, government agencies in these countries can potentially seek and obtain user data through compulsory legal process.
What about requests by the Indian government?
The Indian Government made around 1,490 data requests in the first half of 2013. Yahoo! disclosed non-content data for 494 requests (33 per cent) and content data for 341 requests (23 per cent). It also rejected 500 requests (34 per cent).
Indian users are hesitant about using platforms where personal information can be compromised. How do you deal with it?
We believe the online experience is better when it’s personalised. We offer our users transparency and built-in controls to secure their privacy. Users can set up personalisation preferences that suit them. We also have online resources easily available for users to educate and guide them about privacy.
Is it possible to ensure an advertisement-free interface? How is Yahoo! going about it?
We do have ad-free experiences, but they are charged to the user. For all the services which are free for use, our aim is to leverage the personalisation capability and cloud computing. Obviously, advertising too will be personalised.