or you had a good PR campaign?
Bhatia: That’s one thing about the Internet: if you have something that’s good,
it spreads by word of mouth and like wildfire. You just have to hire a small PR
firm and do it.
Livingston: Had you always planned for Hotmail to be free for users?
Bhatia: Yes.
Livingston: How did you convince people you could make money from targeted
advertising? That was so novel at the time.
Bhatia: It was novel, but at the same time it wasn’t novel, because Yahoo had
gotten funding (and later went public) on that basis. Their whole concept was
to grow by advertising, even though it was a directory, because people would
pay for advertising.
Our whole idea was that, if page impressions are a commodity that can be
sold, can be monetized, then we would generate far greater page impression
than they were able to because you interact a lot more when you do email. You
click on something and a page comes up and you click on something and
another page comes up. So we were thinking of the number of pages and the
number of page impressions as the monetizable quantity. In our estimate, we