Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web’s homepage

Today, I’m talking with Jim Lanzone, who is the CEO of Yahoo.

Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web’s homepage

How Yahoo escaped its Verizon death spiral and became profitable again.

It’s basically impossible to sum up the Yahoo story, but the short version of it is that a long time ago Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and basically everything has gone sideways since. You’ll hear Jim refer to that deal as Yahoo’s original sin, actually. After a long series of mergers and spinouts and an extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company. And it has big properties in sports and finance, and, against all odds, email, where it’s growing with young people. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail, people. You heard it here first.

All of that means Yahoo is profitable and growing, according to Jim, but I still had some big questions about where that growth is going. Yahoo is still the third-place search engine and it just launched a new AI-powered search called Scout, but are they really trying to take market share from Google? Is the big investment in traditional advertising a good bet when creators and influencers are taking up so much attention? And with so much of both sports and finance turning into straight-up gambling, does Jim have any red lines he won’t cross with two of the biggest apps on the internet?

There’s a lot in this one, including some wild *Decoder *org chart terminology and what amounts to two people with a long history on the internet trying to come up with ever deeper references to old memes. It’s a ride, and Jim was pretty much game.

Jim was also a huge nerd about ad tech, and we used a lot of vocabulary talking about his decision to shut down part of Yahoo’s ad business and invest in the part that’s growing. Here’s a quick rundown — feel free to come back to this if it’s too wonky, I promise you’ll get it, it’s not that hard.

A supply-side platform, or SSP, is tech that an app, site, or platform can use to sell space to advertisers. You’ve got inventory — that’s supply — and advertisers use the SSP to buy that inventory. Yahoo had a big SSP, but Jim shut it down a couple years ago in favor of investing in the demand-side platform, or DSP, which works the other way around: An advertiser says it wants to reach a certain number of people, and then the platform does automated auctions across sites and apps to display the ads. This is the big money — it’s how Google makes so much money on the web, for example.

A big DSP doesn’t just deliver ads on the web or in apps, either. You’ll hear Jim talk about CTV, which stands for connected TVs. All those ads in streaming apps? Delivered by big DSPs, including Yahoo’s, which works with Netflix and Spotify.

Okay: Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jim Lanzone, you are the CEO of Yahoo. Welcome to Decoder.

Great to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you. My personal story is wrapped up in the thing that is now Yahoo that you operate. I once worked for AOL, which got smashed into Yahoo in a series of acquisitions. I know you are thinking a lot about what Yahoo is today and the future of the web and its relationship to the larger networks that we all operate on. So I think there’s a lot to unpack there.

I do want to start with my personal history with Yahoo, because I got my start in tech journalism at Engadget at $12 a post when it was owned by AOL. This was a very odd time in media that that was a thing you could do. And just last week, you announced that you are selling Engadget to a thing called Static Media. Take me inside that decision to sell Engadget. You just sold TechCrunch. What’s going on here?

Really it was the last non-Yahoo brand to be sold. Since we were spun out of Verizon in September of 2021, we’ve been in the process of rationalizing the portfolio and what makes sense going forward. I’m sure we’ll talk about it.

But that goes all the way back to, “Why are we still here after all these years? What’s our right to exist? What’s our right to win?” And really the long story short of that goes back to the original mission of the company: being the trusted guide to the internet. In 1995, that meant helping you find websites. In 2026, it can mean all kinds of different things. But that’s where we’re strong. That’s where we’re still strong after all the things the company went through over the years.

When we got here, there were still just a lot of things going on. We had a content delivery network business. The company had drifted very far into all kinds of media and away from its history as more of an aggregator and place to help you find where to go for that media. And again, we can talk about what we think about that. But between TechCrunch, Rivals, which we sold, Engadget, and a lot of other small properties, ultimately also AOL, we sold back in Q4, so on the one hand, it’s about focus. And on the other hand, when it comes to properties like TechCrunch and Engadget, if you think about what we do while we do media, it’s really to provide context for the products that we’re operating in those categories. We’re not the place to go for breaking news. And that’s why Engadget and TechCrunch found homes with, in both cases, families of brands that were either tech-focused or media-focused and really do that kind of journalism, which is really not what Yahoo does.

I want to dig into that for just one more turn. I think “we’re not the place for breaking news,” that has a different valence when you talk about that in the context of sports and finance.

Producing that news or enterprising that news, right? Versus being the aggregator for other people who are doing it.

**That’s the other piece that I’m really curious about. Yahoo bought Artifact, which was a really great AI-powered news app that was started by the founders of Instagram. I’ve talked to Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom about that over the years. One of the reasons they got out of that business and sold it to Yahoo was they were like, “There isn’t enough web to aggregate anymore. News on the web is a declining thing and actually all the action is on social. And as Artifact, we had no access to all of the other platforms on social.” **

Yahoo is an aggregator. I’ve heard you say that before. It’s what you’re saying now. The value here is bringing everything together and providing an audience. Are you running out of web to aggregate? Because this is, to me, the defining problem of our moment right now.

We’re particularly passionate about that. And I’m sure we’ll talk about our AI search engine that we launched, but that’s a big part of the thesis behind that as well. Our core value of that product is doing right by publishers in the open web.

But I actually think that their biggest issue with Artifact was audience, which is the challenge a lot of people have. It’s really hard, especially in news, to build an audience of scale, whether in 2024 when we bought Artifact or today. And so it was a very small user base for a very awesome product. And that product was an aggregator. I think it actually did hit a lot of sources. We hit a lot more with Yahoo. It’s thousands of publishers.

Having direct deals with publishers to have their content aggregated with us has actually been part of the history of the company going back two-plus decades. We send them traffic, and in many cases, share revenue. That’s always been part of the history of Yahoo and what it did well. There are a lot of things that didn’t happen, that didn’t go well. But when we walked into the company, where it was still strong was where we were still doing that in categories that mattered.

Artifact was our admission that what we inherited was probably not the best foot forward for being a great product in that space. We were all fans of Artifact;