Marissa Mayer: Yahoo Is A Personalization Company

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sat down with Michael Arrington to discuss the state of Yahoo. After touching upon the company’s new logo and hires, Mayer talked a bit about the company’s strategy as a whole. In Mayer’s view, Yahoo is “really a personalization company.”

As many of us wait for Yahoo’s new strategy to crystallize after its recent slew of acquisitions, this gives us at least some clearer view of what we can expect from the company in the coming months.

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Looking across the company’s existing products, Mayer argues that “in many cases, we haven’t lost those users. We just want more of their time and attention.” Yahoo’s core competency, she noted, has always been about figuring out the web. The prime example for this is the recent redesign of Yahoo News, she added. “I’m very proud of what we’ve done there.” In the end, to her, Yahoo is “really a personalization company. We’re about organizing the right advertising and content for our users.”

Over the course of the discussion, she also acknowledged that bringing Yahoo back from its slump is hard. At the same time, though, she noted that when she was at Google, she never believed that she could be just as happy somewhere else. At Yahoo, she is.