Success Quote by Terry Semel

The line reads like customer-first rhetoric, but its real maneuver is power: it flips the old media posture of gatekeeping into the platform posture of brokerage. Terry Semel isn’t promising partnership out of altruism; he’s describing a business model where access is the currency and “our customer” is the asset being managed. The phrasing is tellingly asymmetrical. “Put you in front” makes the other party a product to be positioned, while “our customer” signals ownership of the relationship. You don’t get to speak to the audience; you get placed before it, on the platform’s terms.

Semel’s era at Yahoo sits right on the fault line between legacy media logic (content as the crown jewel) and internet logic (distribution as the crown jewel). This sentence is basically a mission statement for the latter: stop talking about what you publish and start talking about who you can deliver. It’s ad-speak with a CEO’s confidence, built to reassure brands and partners that the company’s value isn’t taste or editorial judgment, but traffic, targeting, and scale.

The subtext is the quiet consolidation of leverage. If the “new attitude” is the pitch, the unstated implication is that the old attitude was control over content; now control over attention is the bigger prize. It’s a friendly offer that doubles as a reminder: the platform owns the doorway, and everyone else is negotiating for a spot on the welcome mat.