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We always talk about the Internet a lot, and people always come to me and say, "Jerry, what is the big deal about the Internet?" And I always try to tell them with some numbers and statistics of what is happening on the Internet. At the end of 1997, there are about 70 million users on the Internet on the worldwide bases, and by the end of this year it will be over 100 million. And this is from a very rapid growth in 1995. There was less than 30 million people on the Internet, and you can see that in the net last three years it has grown very, very fast and very, very rapidly. The Internet is very interesting ause it is a platform for information, for business, for commerce and for content. And this is a very interactive medium. It is the only interactive medium that allows you to do all these things. We have really seen a tremendous growth within the United States on the Internet media. And what we are going to see in the future is that the growth outside of the U.S. is going to be much more rapid, much faster, especially in countries like China, in Asia and in Europe. I have to say how important it is to have an interactive medium ause the ability for users like yourself to interact with the Internet to have a dialogue, to experience, is what makes the Internet very, very unique. There is really no other way that can allow you to experience content, commerce and do business like Internet. And this is why I would think that it is very, very important for not only businesses, but also users to get on to Internet and start using it as a way of getting their information and making their life easier.
A lot of people called Yahoo a search engine, and I always have to sort of say that we are more than a search engine. In fact what we have ome is a very powerful brand. Over 30 million users on the every month use Yahoo in the United States. We have tremendous amount of recognition and trust. One of the key things that we have established is every time somebody uses Yahoo we call that a page view. Every month we do over two billion page views and that is oming quite a way of life for a lot of people on Internet. We really appeal to the individual users. We have a lot of people that use Yahoo when they are at work, and we have a lot of people that use Yahoo when they get home at night. And what we are doing is also expanding very rapidly around the world. We have numerous Yahoo versions in Europe, in Asia, in Australia, and we are always expanding, hoping to do more. The key for Yahoo, as many of you know, is a directory structure and its navigational guide. We have over 900,000 Web sites in the US underneath of a few hundreds, thousand categories, and we have over 300 content relationships that we have with major media companies, content companies. And we are always to build, provide users, and consumers, some business solutions to help them find things on their net, to help them shop for something on the Internet, and help them to find information or even other people that they want to contact and communicate with.
A lot of people ask me, "how do you make money?" "What is the business behind Yahoo?" And what are the things we tried to do is have a very partnership-oriented approach. So we have a lot of partners, and our business model is based on the advertising business model. When you use Yahoo you will see a lot of banner advertising that is on top of the pages, and those are paid advertising that we receive for people to display their messages to our users. So this is, I feel, very similar to broadcasting and other kind of media where the user can use the service for free. Many of you know Yahoo is a free product, but we get money from the advertisers who want to reach our users.
Let me talk a little about the history ause I am one of the founders along with my partner David. We were both graduate students at Stanford University in 1994 in California, and instead of working on our thesis, we were playing around on the Internet. And one night my partner David started to put together a database of Web sites, maybe in the first time we did this around 200 Web sites. We put it on the Web, on the World Wide Web, and people started to use it. And in the year 1994 we saw from now usage to almost one million users a day coming to Yahoo everyday. Many people ask me how we come up with the name Yahoo. Well, Yahoo, if you look in a dictionary, it means a very rude and uncivilized people from Gulliver's Travels. And so we, my partner and I, said we are a kind of yahoos ause we are both very uncivilized. And so we take the name, and says it is easy to remember. And that is how we got the name. We decided to turn into business in 1995, almost one year after we started as a hobby at Stanford. We got some virtual capital, money, and started to get some management, people, senior managers, to help us, and we work very hard at getting advertising revenues, and in one year we were able to build a real business. Several important things happened to us in 1996, historically, ause we went public in the Nastaq market in the United States. And we were, ame a profitable company in later of that year. And those are very important things for me but also for the industry, ause a lot of people didn't believe that (with) Internet you can make money. And we showed that by having a strong brand, a good set of users, a good product, we can be a profitable company.
Here are some more statistics about the Yahoo business. In 1997, last year, we did, in US dollars, about 67 million US dollars. We were able to achieve something that a lot of people cannot do yet on the Internet which is, have a very viable business model. Now we have about 450 other Yahoos around the world where headquartered in Silicon Valley in Santa Clara. And we really believe that our business, the Internet business is a global business, and so we have not only 8 offices in the US, but also have offices in 10 countries around the world.
I want to spend a few minutes and talk about Internet advertising ause it is one of those things that people don't often understand -- why it works and how it works. When you build a Web site, when businesses build a Web site, they often have to find a way to get people to know about their Web site. And advertising on the Internet is the best way for people to know about what Web site is where. We have to keep ability of tracking how many people saw the Web site, how many people saw the advertising, and ome a very targeted and accountable medium. We can target it based on different geographies, we can target base on different kinds of people. And it is a very, very large market. Many people don't realize, but in the US alone, almost 200 billion dollars a year were spent on advertising. So even if you think about an Internet advertising, so even if it is one percent of overall advertising market, it is a multi-billion-dollar market.
