David Filo talked about the future plans of Yahoo and presented the number-scorecard of Yahoo-usage statistics, giving the audience a sense of its total reach (approx 250 million users). He also pointed to a growing trend within Yahoo where the paid relationships (approx 3.5) are contributing increasingly to the total revenue, predicting that share of paid relationship was on rise in the form of Yahoo Personals, Yahoo HotJob, Yahoo Mail Plus Services and Yahoo Small Business Services.

In terms of future expansion of Yahoo, among other things, he talked about Blogs, Trusted Networks, Data Mining (read Web Analytics) and Web Search. Talking about Web Search, avoiding a mention of the growing competition in the web-search space, he focused more on search within Yahoo network of services and briefly touched upon ideas like personalized search or searching for specific services, etc.

But one thing remained unanswered, and may be there is no answer to this question. The very nature of online properties, makes them dependent on how much a new media company is able to promote its online brands online, of course, creating an offline buzz might help in promotion of that brand but what seems to work is the online viral buzz creation about a brand or an offering. Besides, for an online brand to be engaging, it will have to offer additional incremental updates or improvements in keeping with user-trends so that the user get used to it, they get a psychological assurance that they will always get the best, so he/she does not have to worry about switching to other service. For instance, if you are using only Yahoo Messenger of Yahoo Mail, then you are almost certain that you will get the near-latest in mail or messaging, so you will not think of switching.

Apart from Yahoo Mail and Messenger and few other core services, Yahoo has failed to create the required online buzz around the various additions to its already bulging services. For example it acquired Broadcast.com for a hefty sum but its services slowly declined in quality and online radio is still booming. Another example, KnowledgeStorm, very interesting technology products and solutions database, it exists on Yahoo but still it is not promoted or cross-sold on other Yahoo properties. May be Yahoo has some commercial reasons for doing this, but not being able to create a sustained buzz is the biggest threat that an online (new) media company can face, and Yahoo will have to reckon with this fact and do something about it.

The question that was put to David Filo in the margins of the presentation, was that why is that Yahoo did not promote or pay attention to small features like News Alerts which has existed on Yahoo for some time now, and its rival Google was able to create so much buzz around such a small offering? David Filo's answer was that they felt that news alert feature was not very important to Yahoo and hence did not pay attention and he also said that they have a vibrant promotions department who takes care of promotion and branding. So the point was that news was just another service provided by Yahoo and alerts just another value-added offering around that service.

This must be a major problem for any player who offers a huge array of services, one just keeps on adding more and more and the attention paid to a service declines over a period of time. But it seems that this is exactly antithetical to the way the online world operates, where one has to constantly strive to engage users and give them more and more reasons to stay with you. You will have to also create enough buzz around your services - however small that service may be- to make the users feel that they have been given the best, of course, the quality of your offering has to be better than others. So it is like a constant tight-rope walk, constant striving for creating interesting offerings and constantly creating buzz around them. May be that is what "new" media is all about?

In comparison, Google has done relatively better, they have managed to create a sustained buzz (Google News Alerts or Google Toolbar) or tapped into an already existing buzz (Blogger acquisition) very well. But as it adds more and more services how long it will be able to maintain this buzz-creation capability it is quite uncertain. For example some of Google Labs inventions have already seem to have fallen by the way side (Google Sets and Google Quotes).

Against this back-drop let us see who succeeds in maintaining the buzz-levels around their offerings.