Science & Tech Quote by Terry Semel

Semel’s line has the brash confidence of an executive trying to will a new media order into permanence. Calling the Internet and Yahoo “firmly established” as “must buys” isn’t just prediction; it’s a boardroom-grade pressure tactic aimed at brand advertisers who, at the time, still treated digital as experimental spend. The phrase “must buys” borrows the language of old-media gatekeeping: the handful of TV shows, glossy magazines, and prime-time slots you purchased not because they were perfect, but because opting out made you look unserious.

The intent is twofold. First, to translate the Internet into a familiar category for cautious marketers: not a chaotic frontier, but a standardized channel with reliable reach. Second, to yoke Yahoo’s fate to the Internet’s inevitability, as if buying “the Internet” and buying Yahoo were adjacent decisions. That rhetorical bundling is the subtext: Yahoo isn’t a website; it’s positioned as an infrastructure brand, the on-ramp to mass culture online.

Context matters. Semel, a Hollywood-and-media veteran, ran Yahoo during the early 2000s when portals still imagined themselves as the digital equivalents of broadcast networks. Brand advertising was the prestige money, the kind that signaled mainstream legitimacy beyond direct-response clicks. The line reads as both sales pitch and defensive posture against rising competitors (especially search-driven advertising models) that would soon redefine “must buy” around performance, not presence. It’s a snapshot of an era when digital wanted to be TV, right before it became something sharper, stranger, and far less controllable.