After a 14 month or so hiatus that coincided with my tenure at Yahoo! — I am excited to be back blogging on a semi-regular basis.

It was a great experience running Yahoo! News, Tech, and Education after the sale of BuzzTracker - and I was proud to be part of a ton of progress both from a product and financial results perspective.  BuzzTracker is now live on every (brand new) Yahoo! News story page — powering the Most Blogged About module — and it is gratifying to see the technology we developed being used by over 40MM Unique Users, according to Comscore, every month.  I also had the opportunity to see the world-class talent and power of the Yahoo! Front Page and Network up close.  And it is truly impressive.  The talent and opportunities are all in place to turn the company and it’s fortunes — and I wish Yahoo! the best of luck in doing so!

As I said many times over the past year — when you are running a media business you fundamentally have three levers:  Reach, Engagement, and Monetization.  Yahoo! has cracked the code on the toughest lever to succeed at — Reach — and I firmly believe that through focus and desire Monetization and Engagement are easily attainable.  They key is to not fall prey to the false choice of “user experience vs. monetization,” but rather to seek to drive up metrics for both.  I fully expect Yahoo! to build on its great investments of the past few years (APT, RightMedia, BlueLithium, BuzzTracker) to start driving Operating Cash Flow in a significant way and I look forward to watching it happen!

Look for me on twitter:  alanwarms –