Ask him what's most important to him as head of the joint news venture between Microsoft and NBC and he says, "Being No. 1."

In terms of revenue, the unit is "extremely profitable," according to Tillinghast, who has been with MSNBC since 1999. He would not disclose actual revenue figures, but he did say revenue in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2005, was up 40 percent over the same period in 2004.

Profits aside, MSNBC has been locked in a stalemate with Yahoo! News and CNN.com for the last two years in terms of Web traffic, Web page views and the average time users spend at the site. (See accompanying chart.) And that's not where MSNBC and Tillinghast want to remain.

Starting in June, Tillinghast refocused the unit on four areas he believes will drive more traffic to the site, enabling MSNBC to break away from the competition —— search engine optimization, content syndication, content personalization and video.

MSNBC has two main news operations —— a cable news channel and an online news site. The bulk of the online operation is based on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, with other news operations in London, Secaucus, N.J., and Washington, D.C.

Search engine optimization is the art of making it easier for search engines such as Google to find MSNBC stories on the Web.

"We weren't prominently ranked before" in search results, he said.

Prior to June, MSNBC used a six-digit story number that identified a story as a health story or a political story, making it hard for search engines crawling the Web to recognize the stories for what they were.

Now, story titles have a headline-like quality to them, "Marines fight in Iraq," for example, that make it easier for search engines to find, he said.

Data from Comscore Networks Inc., a Reston, Va. research house that tracks Internet trends, showed no discernible movement in MSNBC traffic since the site started tagging its stories differently.

The MSNBC news staff and technological team operates under the belief that if they can make the site's news stories more relevant to individual users, those users will keep coming back.

"MSNBC is about the marriage of journalism and technology," Tillinghast said. "One of the ideas is to create an (MSNBC) home page that is different for every single user."

Prior to his tenure at MSNBC, Tillinghast worked in the health-care, semiconductor and software sectors.

In June, MSNBC launched three new features —— most-recommended stories, highest-rated stories, most e-mailed and most-viewed stories. Readers can rate stories from one to five stars (one being a low-rated story and five a high-rated story) using a tab at the bottom of each story, or they can e-mail them to others using another bottom-of-the-story tab. The idea is to recirculate MSNBC's user traffic as robustly as possible.

Tillinghast sees content syndication as another potential traffic enhancer. As it stands now, no other news sites carry MSNBC stories, except MSN.

Potential partners "would be people we're not competitive with, like a local news site of any kind —— any newspaper site in the country would be a fit," Tillinghast said.

Chris Sherman, editor of "Search Engine Watch," an online newsletter that tracks the Internet search and media industries, thinks syndication of MSNBC stories is a logical next step for the site.

Although about 80 percent of stories at MSNBC come from NBC, The Associated Press, Reuters and other news agencies, Sherman thinks MSNBC has an advantage over Yahoo because it reports many of its own stories.

Yahoo doesn't, and Yahoo! News general manager Neil Budde said has no plans to do so.

Tillinghast's long-term vision for MSNBC is to make the site more like an online television news report, with live reporting to cover events as they happen.

According to internal numbers, Hollywood actor Tom Cruise's now-famous confrontation with "Today" show host Matt Lauer on June 24 was watched by 2.5 million people on MSNBC. In early July, the terrorist bombings in London generated 4.4 million video streams in one day.

Video is also a potential jackpot for MSNBC. Tillinghast said about 10 percent of its overall advertising revenue comes from ads and short commercials that run with its video news clips.

Video ads command a higher price than other forms of ads, with a $40 CPM at MSNBC. CPM is a standard ad rate that represents the advertiser's cost per thousand impressions. Most ads have a $1 to $25 CPM, Tillinghast said.

On Aug. 30, 9 million users streamed video of the catastrophic damage caused in the South by Hurricane Katrina, a new record for the site.

Yahoo's Budde said video is an important aspect of Internet news coverage, but he is skeptical about whether MSNBC's efforts in that arena will significantly boost traffic.

"In terms of the pure number of people consuming online video content, it's a small percentage of total page views," he said.

That may be so, but it hasn't stopped Yahoo from making its own forays into online video. On Aug. 1, Yahoo signed a deal to provide daily video feeds to its users from ABC News and CNN.com.

At the top of Tillinghast's list of current chores is finding a replacement for former Editor-in-chief Dean Wright, who left MSNBC in June.