Let me talk a little about that Web advertising market and update on 'Net. In 1997, em, in 1996, the number of dollars spent on the Web was around 270 million US dollars. That is the amount of money that the Web advertisers spent. Last year that number was around 700 million dollars. In 1998, this year, over one billion dollars will be spent on the Web advertising alone. And this is primarily driven out the United States and Western Europe, and some parts of Asia. And we really believe that the growth will continue to double at a very, very rapid rate. In fact, one of the key things I shared with you earlier was that, Yahoo can reach tens of millions of people over the course of a month. And this is oming as popular a medium as television, newspapers, and magazines. So that we are now competitive in many ways with traditional media advertisement. To give you an example, in last quarter, in the last part of last year, we had over 1,700 advertisers. Over 70 percent of them are consumer brand advertisers, and so not everybody who advertise on the Internet are technology companies, but they could be names you are very familiar with, like Coca Cola, or telephone companies or car companies.
One of the biggest things that happened in 1997 for me was that Electronic Commerce, Internet Commerce, ame a possibility. A number of companies in United States ame aware and ame possible to start doing commerce and transactions, such as shopping, over the Internet. I, for example, myself, did a lot of my Christmas shopping on the Internet ause I don't like to go buy things at stores. So I order some pants, one of them I am wearing now, over the Internet. And it was at ause I know exactly what size I want it and it showed up online home. The opportunity for Web Commerce is very, very large. In 1997, last year, about 3 billion dollars of merchandise were sold through the Internet in the United States. By the year 2000, that number is going to be over 100 billion dollars. And you can see year by year there is going to be a tremendous amount of transactions that going to happen over the Internet. The Web is very interesting ause it allows users thelves to be active. They are the persons that are in charge. And consumers, people who are doing the Web surfing, have a lot of options, and they have the choice. So a lot of people are recognizing that the customers now can have a very important say in what to buy, how to buy it and where to buy it. And as a result many industries in United States are undergoing some very rapid change, ause of the buying power on the Web. At least there are some examples here. For example, stocks. People not only look at stock information, but also trade, and buy, and sell stocks electronically through the Web. In fact, there are many very successful companies that are now emerge (emerging) in the United States that all it do (does) is (to) sell stocks over the Web. We work with a partner called Etrade that does exactly that. In the United States now, it is tax season. And for the first time, you can file some of your taxes over the Web. And this is a very convenient way for people to gather information, to understand the laws that have changed about taxes, and now be able to process and sermon your tax forms online. Other applications that are very, very important, are travel, where you can buy airline tickets, book hotels, book rental cars through travel sites; buy books, Amazon.com is a very famous bookstore now on the Web; you can buy computers and software and hardware and accessories through Web -- people, for example, like Dell Computers and Gateway 2000, have created the tremendous opportunity to go directly to the consumers; you can buy music CDs, videos, almost anything you can imagine that you can buy through retail now you are beginning to buy on the Web. I believe that in the United States you will see even more industries change ause the way that the Web is so popular and people have ability to conduct commerce at their own pace. They can talk to whoever they want to talk to, (find out,) do some research and then conduct the transaction based on their own behavior rather than having to go to somebody else to buy the merchandise.
So I want to show you this chart ause it talks about Yahoo's strategy and where we want to be as a company. We have a lot of content on the Web. Millions of Web sites that are on the top; and on the bottom we have tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users; and in the middle is where Yahoo is focusing our efforts. We develop the technology; we develop the advertise; we develop the business model to help build merchant-consumer commerce services like the ones I talked about taxes, stocks, computing goods. We talk of contents, news, sports. We talk about the directory, that I talked about the aggation which I call, we call super aggation and core aggation. And on the two sides we have two very important elements. The personalization element, which is how do we make the Web, how do we, how do Yahoo help you make the Web more personal. Everybody should have a very unique experience with the Web. You don't have to have the same experience ause it is interactive. And we are trying very hard to bring a personalized component to the Web experience. And the other side we have communication. And the key to allow the Web success is the fact not only can you get content from publishers or information sources, you can also communicate through email, through chatting and through messaging that is now ome a very big part Web usage in the United States. And we believe by doing these parts well, by helping people find the content need, find the products and services they need, and finding other people that they need to find, we can ome a new kind of company that ties together people on the Web.