User Profiles at Yahoo!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Sep 26, 2008
At the IMC Vancouver conference, Bob Page, Sr. Director, Yahoo! Strategic Data Solutions, presented Insights from Inside Yahoo!'s Data. Given the importance of member profiles in online communities, I was particularly interested in his explanation of Yahoo! profiles.
"It starts with a user profile," said Bob. "A set of features attributed to a ‘user', a user profile contains all features attributed to a given ID." Yahoo! profiles have multiple layers:
- Declared Data - Information provided by the user, such as their gender, geographic location, preferences, social graph and Facebook screen name. I assume the social graph is derived from Yahoo! information, such as their IM buddies in Yahoo! Messenger and their buddies' buddies, as well as from their Yahoo! Mail email address book.
- Observed Data - Behavioral information collected about the user, such as their page views, ad views, ad clicks and searches.
- Insights - Preferences that are implied by their social graph (e.g., preferences of friends) and BT scores.
"In addition to directly targeting customers, we also build look-alike models," said Bob. A target "thumbprint" is prepared for the desired demographic; Yahoo! user IDs are then scored and ranked based on how closely their own user profile's "thumbprint" matches the target. The algorithm takes into account gaps in each user's profile, where data corresponding to the target has not been gathered.
Given that most core Yahoo! services are free, the user profiles also include an estimated "user value". This user value includes the following data, for each user and each Yahoo! web property:
- Finance: Revenues
- Fees from Premium Services
- Non-traditional marketing services
- Traditional marketing services
- Listings
- Finance: Costs
- Cost of Sales
- Op Ex
- Level 1 allocation
- Level 2 allocation
- Data Team: Activities
- Page views
- Ad views
- Clicks
- Feed subscriptions
This user-value calculation (total revenues, total costs, net-value derived) provides a detailed Return On Investment for every Yahoo! user.
Yahoo! user profiles are among the most sophisticated in the industry, and far exceed what is done for most proprietary panels and online communities. Monday, I'll look at lessons from Yahoo! for defining profiles of community members. [Update: Tips for Defining Community-Member Profiles]