'We Can Deliver Customers on a Global Basis'

That has left top managers like Killen with the daunting task of persuading some of the world's biggest monopolists to all but change their worldviews. "I tell them that it's not necessarily to their advantage to have exclusive distribution relationships, that wider distribution ends up being a cheap form of marketing, as well as a revenue driver," explains Killen. "It's a tough sell at first, but we think that most players will eventually see that more distribution is better."

For the short term, however, Yahoo!'s insistence on nonexclusivity has given an upper hand to some of its toughest competitors: local portals that have little to lose by entering exclusive deals with companies that dominate their markets. "There's a finite pool of local partners, and all the portals are vying for the same resources," says Victoria Bracewell-Short, 39, a consultant with IXL Inc., whose portal clients have had similar trouble inking deals with Brazil's top media players. "In some cases, you have no choice but to go with second- or third-tier players until the bigger ones see the light."

That's very much how Killen had to proceed when she first arrived at Yahoo! four years ago. Charged with building its European presence from scratch, she first sought to add news, weather, and financial information to the sites. But when she approached some of the continent's biggest wire services, they balked. "We tried to get a quotes feed from Reuters," recalls Killen. "But they wanted to start their own for-pay service and felt threatened." So she appealed instead to smaller national wire services, cutting deal terms that traded news and financial quotes for a small stream of revenue, along with a chance for those news agencies to gain first-time exposure on the Internet. Smaller deals soon led to bigger ones as news groups like Agence France Presse and Deutsche Press Agenteur signed on.

The start-small strategy has since been replicated around the world. And while people like Alonso wish that they could woo the big players more quickly, they're dedicated to working within the confines of Yahoo!'s global ideals. "I bought into the open-platform idea when I signed on here," says Alonso. "It definitely makes it more challenging to localize the content. But so far we've been able to find the information that our users want without having to send them to another site. And with all the technology that Yahoo! brings, we've got all kinds of advantages in making them stay."

Audiences "R" Us

Wherever you go, there you are. Log onto any Yahoo! site around the world, and even if you've registered on another Yahoo! property, you'll still be greeted with a friendly "Welcome, Alex!" (Or whatever name you've registered under.) That personalized salutation might not seem like a big deal, but it's at the core of Yahoo!'s strategy to leverage every aspect of what is fast becoming the Internet's most visited commercial network. Regardless of where you sign up, or which Yahoo! site you log onto, every registrant around the world becomes part of a massive, unified database. That not only allows the portal to personalize every interaction with its users, but it also lets Yahoo!'s global marketers mine and categorize that user database at will, giving Yahoo! the ability to deliver on Killen's "Audiences 'R' Us!" promise.

The idea represents a global twist on what media companies have been doing on a national scale for several decades. From the establishment of the first coast-to-coast TV network in the 1950s to the recent merger-and-acquisition frenzy in the radio-broadcast industry, media bigwigs have long tried to consolidate their audiences into bigger and bigger chunks. The larger the audience, the easier it is to sell to the biggest advertisers, who prefer to buy airtime or ad space in bulk rather than piecemeal.

Until now, however, there have been few, if any, one-stop shops for advertisers that want to reach a global audience. Instead, multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Sony have been forced to place ads on a country-by-country basis, hiring advertising agencies in each country, then placing ads in local media outlets. But thanks to Yahoo!'s expanding list of international properties, along with a technology platform that makes it easy to collect and categorize users around the world, Killen says that the portal is in a unique position to change all that. "We can deliver customers on a global basis," she says. "And right now, I don't think there are many other companies in the world that can do that."