Gideon Yu joins former Yahoo Tony Nethercutt who heads up YouTube's sales team and is expected to start within the month. Yahoo has seen a number of employees tempted away by search engine rival Microsoft and by fresh faced dot-com newcomers, like YouTube, in recent months. Yahoo's stock prices have dropped to 2004 levels and the search engine portal has seen a number of staff departures in recent weeks. Yahoo's net income in 2005 was $1,896 million. YouTube employs 60 people.
Yahoo's search engine business has come under pressure from the launch of Microsoft's own pay-per-click platform adCenter. Previously, paid for adverts which appeared alongside Microsoft's search results were supplied by Yahoo. The two search engines split the revenue. Microsoft's adCenter is positioned to rival Google's adWords and many in the industry believe Yahoo faces a formidable challenge to hold its market share.
Yahoo's video search engine discovers video media by crawling the web and through XML feeds. This approach differs from Google Video and YouTube which both allow users to upload their videos to share. YouTube's incredible growth has been attributed, in part, to the ease at which videos can be uploaded to the site. YouTube and Google's technology automatically converts digital video camera formats to Flash.
The Wall Street Journal broke the news of Gideon Yu's departure from Yahoo on Saturday. In the story, the Journal comments that Yu's move was, "the latest example of a longtime pattern in Silicon Valley, where young, fast-growing companies draw attention and talent away from older, more-established firms."
YouTube is still exploring ways to effectively earn revenue from its massively popular service and currently displays contextual search advertising provided by Google. The Wall Street Journal discusses the possibility of a flotation, "It is also a sign of the year-and-a-half-old YouTube's maturation, possibly portending preparations for deal-making or an eventual initial public offering,".
