"We're looking at helping people manage their content," Bartz said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, during a keynote appearance in which she was interviewed on stage by conference co-chairman John Battelle.

When Battelle asked her if the content management service she was describing existed as a product already, she answered that it doesn't. Once it's ready, Yahoo will be able to help Web publishers with both ads and content, she said.

The "content optimization" tool would focus on helping publishers personalize their content offerings and target it better for their site visitors, a process that requires automation, algorithms and data crunching at a scale that can't be done manually, she said.

For example, Yahoo serves up 6 million variations of its home page every day, varying the content it displays and the placement of items, based on what it determines will be the best experience for different users, she said.

Part of that knowledge comes from what Yahoo knows about signed-in users, from machine-learning insights and, also, from human-driven editorial decisions, Bartz said.