'We Can Deliver Customers on a Global Basis'

Yahoo! uses a company-wide template for its Web sites, designed to build its brand and leverage its underlying technology on a global scale. The Yahoo! logo (with the relevant country's name beneath it) sits top and center on every site. The buttons that link to Yahoo!'s stickiest applications -- email, Messenger, MyYahoo, and auctions -- are positioned alongside. The shopping box comes next, followed by the directories, each one with 14 categories. Sponsors are always listed on the right. Company information, including links to other Yahoo! sites, is listed at the bottom. "We do what we feel looks like Yahoo!, and we don't want our people doing too much to change that," Killen says.

Work hard to generate local content.

Yahoo! takes great pains to avoid embarrassing gaffes when it translates news or information from one language to another. The best way to attract users from outside the United States is to infuse sites with content that is generated locally. "We don't squirt English-language news through a translation engine and then put it up on our China or Argentina sites," says Killen. "That would never work."

Even big players have to start small.

You would think that a company as prominent as Yahoo! could enter any country and strike partnerships with the biggest local players. Think again. There are lots of big companies outside the United States with an old-economy perspective on Internet alliances, and the era of media monopolies remains alive and well in many markets. That's why Killen and her Yahoo! colleagues have often struck a first round of deals with smaller, hungrier partners. Such deals became "key stepping-stones," says Killen. "Once people saw that others were doing deals with us, they were like, 'Oh, wow! Why aren't we doing that?' "