Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer discusses 680 million users, investments and Livestand at CM Summit

Blake Irving became Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer just a little over a year ago after a 15-year career at Microsoft. Today, at the CM Summit in New York City, John Battelle asked him why he took the job. Blake told the Federated Media founder that the answer is easy.

“It’s an amazing brand, with 680 million users worldwide, great technology and great people,” Blake said, matter-of-factly. “And it’s just getting better. There is an amazing opportunity to become one billion users and create that incredible value for marketers and advertisers on a worldwide basis.”

Asked about the criticisms that the brand sometimes gets, Blake agreed that there was a time when Yahoo! wasn’t moving as quickly as it could have. However, he pointed to how the company grew initially as the reason behind this. A series of acquisitions led to a variety of different infrastructures at Yahoo!, which made innovation challenging—changes to the core of one product couldn’t translate across all properties.

For the last three years, Yahoo! has committed to re-architecting its core technologies and systems from the bottom up. Blake acknowledged that these changes are neither quick nor easy; they were investments that had to scale for 680 million users. He explained that with that kind of audience, you have to scale all the time. “We are literally flying the plane at 35,000 feet, taking on passengers, painting the plane, changing the engines, ripping and replacing parts, all at the same time,” he said at the summit.

With a common architecture now at the core, Yahoo! has rolled out 46 sites this year alone. We serve 45,000 variations of our homepage every five minutes, based on users’ interests. Soon, an editor will be able to publish a site that targets a particular audience in a particular geographic area without having to rely on an engineer. Blake told the audience that that’s what makes Yahoo! the premier digital media company at scale.

“So what I understand is that Yahoo! is a premier media company at scale? I like that,” Battelle replied. “The reason I like that is that it’s clear.”

Coming soon: Livestand

Blake ended the session with a sneak preview of what’s next for Yahoo!: Livestand. A dynamic content ecosystem based on Yahoo!’s now unified backend, Livestand will work on PCs, tablets and mobiles. While it may look like Flipboard or a cool iPad app to some, Blake says that Livestand is much more. It will be defined by personalization, and reap the benefits of all the last few years of hard work.

“Livestand is about delivering content that a user is interested in, and combining that with the social graph and interest graph, as well as geographic location. It’s totally new and different,” said Blake.

The advantage for advertisers is that using a tablet is a “lean-forward experience.” It’s a unique environment with higher engagement that combines the best of TV and magazine experiences. Blake expressed confidence that the return-on-investment will be strong for brand marketers.

For more from Blake on the unique Science + Art + Scale that Yahoo! delivers for its advertisers, check out the Yahoo Advertising Blog.

— Dianne Molina