Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?

I'd vote for that.

I would focus on two things: #1 innovation and #2 revenue.

With innovation, as CEO I would lead a entire division focused on innovation and discovering the next billion dollar revenue source. Lots of prototyping, refining, and searching for the next big thing.

With #2 revenue, I would focus on what currently is giving Yahoo the most revenue and seek ways to grow that. This would provide moderate growth but most importantly fund the innovation that will be the future of the company. Anybody ready to vote me in?

This will require strong leadership. First thing is you're gonna have to convince the Board and investors not to simply sell Yahoo off. The changes have to be dramatic in order for Yahoo to thrive:

- Simplify it, starting with the homepage. There are way too many things going on here, and I'm sure a ton of features many people don't use. Yahoo dating is handled via Match, but most people who date online already know what Match is, why go through Yahoo? And get rid of Yahoo shopping for now as well, it's not clear what purpose it serves. - Focus on the things that count the most to people. That would include Flickr, Finance, email. Even Yahoo News is pretty useful. - Build a social network around your existing email users. Allow your users to easily incorporate their photos from Flickr. It may be easier to focus on building a network that is mobile based, rather than desktop. If you're going to make an acquisition, try something along the lines of Instagram and then incorporate flickr into it. Then grow it from there, don't even bother with a desktop version, you won't be able to take on facebook at this point. - Getting back to Finance - invest more into it. There's no reason it can't be a CNBC or Bloomberg. I like reading the articles, but I'm not entirely thrilled with the video segments and the quality of the guests, which would typically include some random unknown private equity/hedge fund type person predicting a financial apocalypse. Big potential here. You could create an independent channel that is featured on Yahoo! and maybe partner with companies that will ultimately require more content as they take on the cable industry, such as Netflix, Apple, etc. I have a lot more ideas, but it's late and I'm tired. Despite it's criticisms I'm still a big Yahoo user, for email which I pop (oh, and make it free - that's just a nice thing to do at this point). I'm hoping they make some bold moves to enhance their stature.

Yahoo's biggest "problem" is the huge revenue and profit it continues to make. Jobs had a big advantage when he came back to Apple -- it was losing $1B/year and was about to go broke. Everything needed to change. When you have a huge business to screw up, it isn't so easy to make a sweeping change that could disrupt the business model for years. At Yahoo you could probably cut back to 100 ops people and 200 sales people and rake in billions in revenue and profit for a decade or more. In fact, most Yahoo! die hard users would like the message "We are never going to change Yahoo! again. It will remain exactly like this from now on. No more redesigns. No new features. No changes of any kind. Your My Yahoo page is safe."

Yahoo's business is driven by the adoption of Yahoo! Mail. Most people that use it (it is the largest email provider in the US), don't realize they could put in mail.yahoo.com rather than yahoo.com so stop there on their way to their inbox. That is enough to power nearly every other media site they control to the #1 position with the right mix of articles on the home page.

I would turn Yahoo into the curators of the web once again.

(1) Create a group that better identifies and manages relevant and trustworthy information quickly for popular categories/topics.

(2) Create a group that finds and reports new/interesting websites.

(3) Make Yahoo Answers much better, or buy Quora.

(4) Create a massive user reviewed products database.

(5) Cut the clutter & trash off the webpages. Simplify!