Questions for Ali Diab of Yahoo! Local Products
Ali Diab studied Economics, French Literature, and Math at Stanford and graduated business school at age 23 as part of Oxford’s first MBA class. From there he joined Goldman Sachs where he worked on some famous mergers and IPOs (including the IPO of NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile phone company). He started his own Internet company, BuildPoint, worked for Microsoft and was offered the job of Chief Product Officer at T-Mobile Online before joining Yahoo!–all well before his 30th birthday.
As head of production for Yahoo! Local Products, Ali keeps that same momentum going. He provides strategic direction for the Local product line which includes City Guides, Yahoo! Local, Maps, and Yellow Pages.
I’ll be sitting down with Ali soon to talk about all this and more. If you have questions you’d like me to ask him, just post them below.
Yvette Irvin
Y! Profiler
Yvette – I really appreciate that you all open these interviews up to outside questions.
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Ali,
I believe local is an excellent idea… on paper. I personally hate using the Big Yellow Book, but must if I want to find something close to me, like a repairman. Using the repairman example, what if said repairman doesn’t have a website, why would he/she want to use Yahoo! Local?
I was actually thinking that these Local search directories would make a lot more money (and have more listings) if they also provided a small web space for local vendors who do not have the use for a full blown website to have a place to list their information (other than the basic this is the business address and phone number) that they can call their own. I definitely think it would build loyalty and also add a lot of small vendors who are still slow to come to the web. What do you thin?
Natasha Robinson
Real Estate Logic
putting Logic in Real Estate.
http://www.realestatelogic.net
One of the more interesting features in Yahoo Local is the ability for users to write reviews of local merchants. From your press release, “Users can now rate and review almost every business in the country.”
Could you talk a bit about this feature and how it differentiates Yahoo Local from competitors?
HELP! I’m signed up with yahoo with my stock portfolio, “Richards Mining Stocks” but lost yahoo access during a recent “virus” attack.
Can you offer any help?
Local is really great, i can’t wait for it to be extended internationally
I’d like to understand how Yahoo is going to obtain the information for Yahoo Local. Are you going to crawl webpages and directories and provide links to those sites? Or are you going to obtain information that is not online through partners?
In other words, are you going to index information that is online or are you also going to obtain offline information?
Also, how are you going to handle local advertising? Most of local businesses are not used to advertising on the Internet. Will you seek local partners with sales forces to sell those advertising spaces? Or will you trust that local businesses will adhere to your current advertising programs?
Thanks!!
John
I’m curious how you’re going to sell advertising to businesses whose customers can (and will) write negative reviews of them. Why would I pay to advertise if my investment can be destroyed by 1 bad review from an unhappy customer?
Will Yahoo be a biased directoy (i.e. one who displays only the reviews that advertisers approve of)? Or perhaps reviews will potentially go away as other features of Yahoo Local provide a sufficient traffic draw.
It seems that either advertising revenue will be suppressed or Yahoo’s brand will be tarnished (if users can’t trust your content) to the extent that you establish a trade-off in loyalty between advertisers and consumers.