When Yahoo! announced that it hired Katie Couric as its Global Anchor, the industry consensus was that Couric’s multi-million dollar salary would eek out a small profit through the increased value of expensive ad units, like homepage takeovers.

But, the real value in the brand name journalists that Melissa Mayer has been hiring is that, collectively, they give end users something valuable, inspiring and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day. And by doing so, gives Yahoo the opportunity to drive growth. But, to capitalize on this, Yahoo needs to evolve.

Yahoo must continuously learn more about the readers who visit its properties, so it can keep building its advertising targeting capabilities. Yahoo has a massive 2 petabyte database of behavioral data (growing at 1.2 terabytes of data daily). This provides a long tail of targetable segments, which provide orders of magnitude more revenue to…