At age 2, Jerry Yang lost his father. At 10, he moved to America, a country in whose language he could only say the word shoe on his first day of school. Years later, having mastered (well, almost) English, he matriculated at Stanford University. Eight years afterward, he and fellow Stanford lifer David Filo created Yahoo!, which is now on the verge of becoming the Web's most heavily-trafficked site.

Yahoo! began its existence as an Internet directory, but quickly blossomed into much, much more than that. Today it is one of the Web's leading sources of news, stock quotes, phone numbers, TV listings, as well as weather, traffic, and ski reports, among other things. Its 12-month transition from being the pastime of a couple of guys in a trailer into an international media property worth almost a billion dollars is one of the great tales of modern American entrepreneurship.

Chapter 6 tells that tale in greater depth than it has ever been told before. It shows how Jerry and Dave turned a small, defensible niche of Web traffic into a magnet of media attention, a juggernaut that will soon be pushing out more pages to its audience every week than Time magazine prints for its readers. The chapter also explores how media relationships on the Web can multiply in value as elements of persistence (i.e. repeated interactions through which a media provider gets to know its audience members on an individual level) are introduced to them. Yahoo! will soon have more persistent, one-to-one customer relationships than any other company in the world which, Chapter Six argues, could soon poise it to become "the world's most powerful media property." Chapter Six also examines how many well-established industries, including classified advertising, Yellow Pages listings, and even map-making are ripe for Internet enablement. It explains how the integration of these and countless other services into the Yahoo! juggernaut are fueling its growth and its relevance.

Its almost frightening to contemplate what Jerry and Dave might achieve once they finish their Ph.D.'s.

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