In his five years at Yahoo! Finance, most of it as general manager, Nathan Richardson pushed annual revenue from $10 million to $110 million and expanded the site's content partners from 10 to 200. In 2005 Institutional Investor ranked him the most influential person in online finance. He later became general manager at Dow Jones and took time off to head the Liberia office of the International Rescue Committee.  He is now chief executive of ContentNext Media, which owns the popular digital media blog PaidContent. Richardson helped engineer ContentNext's $30 million sale to Britain's Guardian Media Group last summer. He spoke with Forbes in January from his Manhattan office on the top floor of the Radio Wave building, so named for its earlier incarnation: a hotel where Nicola Tesla once lived.  Forbes: What's your take on new Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) chief executive Carol Bartz?  Richardson: She is an incredibly talented person. She'll be looking at the metrics very seriously. But she's a B2B person, not B2C. Yahoo is B2C.  How did you build Yahoo! Finance?  I spent a lot of time creating moats around user traffic and bringing game-changing content to the site. We created a solid dialogue between technology, products, business and sales. But the biggest game changer was building our own stock ticker plant.  At the time, Yahoo! was taking its stock quotes from Reuters, but Reuters pulled all their news from Internet sites. We thought we could do it far better and faster, so we opened an office in India, which pulled together financial market data and ticker feeds. That information was used to create a stock ticker quote box. We got partner sites like Motley Fool and Quicken to carry this box and direct traffic back to our site by giving it to them for free. We built Yahoo! Finance with six engineers in India.  A "moat" around users--what does that mean?  It means getting people to stick with the site. When I left Yahoo! Finance our users spent triple the amount of time at our site vs. our competitors. People want voice, breadth, aggregated search function and blog content from news sites. Give that to them and you get super sticky engagement.  An acronym for our qualifying criteria was ASPIC, which stands for Aggregation, Search, Personalization, Integration and Community. Nowadays we're focused on video integration, mobile, editorial, community and thinking about the "X" factor.  That's the thing we know we should have, but don't yet know what it is.  You thought Dow Jones' acquisition of MarketWatch in 2005 gave Dow Jones some unique leverage. Do old media platforms like the New York Times need to make more acquisitions like this?  I thought About.com was a fantastic acquisition for the Times. I use the Times' iPhone application. Boston.com is an amazing site, it's the 12th most trafficked in the news category. Obviously, all this is not enough.  Kaplan, Inc., is supporting the Post. Sam Zell is in bankruptcy. The Times is borrowing money from Carlos Slim. Why can't Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo! and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) team up?  I think Eric Schmidt, Steve Balmer and Carol Bartz should each chip in $2 billion, at a 10% premium on the stock of companies like the New York Times and Washington Post and put them in an editorial trust. Companies like Yahoo!, AOL or MSN Money don't compete on where that content comes from. They only compete on how they package it.  We're doing it with banking and autos. Technology companies have the chance to do it without the government's help. Bill Gates could do it in a snap. It would be brilliant publicity and generate enormous good will for anyone involved.  What's the smartest thing being done on the Web today?  Online reality TV. What American Idol is doing is brilliant. They're creating online communities and engagement, video and text messaging and polling. They don't ask for engagement, they demand it. If you want to vote on a song, you have to listen to all 10 tracks for 20 seconds. For one record, that's more time spent than most Web sites can boast about for an entire day. That's powerful. Simon Cowell is incredibly savvy.  I'm a big fan of TalkingPointsMemo. They haven't made it personal or gossipy, they just make it news. On the other end of the spectrum is NewsMax. They've captured an audience that's different than what everyone views as mainstream news sites and are monetizing it incredibly well.  What does Barack Obama's presidency mean for the technology world?  Obama is 47 years old, won't give up his Blackberry, informed his campaign staffers of his vice presidential pick by text message, probably uses a Kindle, has raised his money through online communities and is hiring people off Google, Yahoo! and Facebook to build his platforms. The Dulles corridor is going to spring to life. Obama's presidency alone should be a huge incentive for technology companies to invest aggressively.
The man who brought you Yahoo! Finance has some thoughts on saving ''The New York Times'' and what comes next online.