In an interview posted today at Reuters, Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business, talked about the Yahoo! search deal, profitability, MSN, AOL, and more.  Mehdi expects closing the Yahoo! search deal to be a milestone moment, saying that “for advertisers, we are a credible No. 2”, once the deal closes.  Mehdi talked about profitability:

The biggest part of moving into profit "is just getting the scale," said Mehdi. "We’re built out to be a much larger player. We’ve spent the money and built out in such a way that we can be a player at scale. Every day that we grow a tenth of point of share, that moves us further up the curve."

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"There’s no question we intend to make a profit," said Mehdi

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"Clearly there’s a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we’ve put in to this point."

Mehdi also talked about MSN, saying that the planned revision to MSN.com (you can check it out here) has been delayed until March. "To get that right, it takes some time, so we’ve delayed it a little bit to make sure we get the features right," he said.

Be sure and check out the interview at Reuters.