Latest news with #JimLanzone
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone talks AI, reinvention, and reclaiming relevance
Yahoo is at a critical inflection point. Despite having a large user base—across Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo News—the media company hasn't reclaimed the buzz of its early days. CEO Jim Lanzone candidly discusses the fear of being 'left behind' and how he's pushing the brand to shed its old skin. He explains the wide-ranging implications as AI remakes search engines into answer engines and shares insights about the line between fantasy sports and gambling. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I wanted to ask you, you talk about it like Yahoo is sort of in a turnaround or a restart. But I mean, Yahoo News is the number-one news site on the internet, right? Yahoo Finance is the number one. Your fantasy sports platform is huge. You've got a big ad tech business, which I'm sure you talk about here. Second-largest email platform. You've got search, not Google-size search, but still substantial . . . All that sounds pretty robust. Yeah. Amazing ingredients with which to do a turnaround. So the way I would think about it is that absolutely the brands are still extremely relevant and they've had very loyal user bases. As a business, I think a lot of people know, but some maybe don't, that we were spun out of Verizon. Over the years, Yahoo was a stand-alone public company. It was acquired by Verizon in the mid-2010s. They also acquired AOL, which we also own and is one of our brands. And we were acquired for about $5 billion. So if you think about the other brands in and around our rankings in the traffic rankings, they're all trillion dollar brands. And so we had something to work with in terms of the size and loyalty of some of the audiences. But in some cases, email's one of them. We had a big announcement last week. The core product hadn't been improved in over 10 years. And so in the last nine months, every product that we operate has been relaunched with brand-new versions. And so taking advantage of the size of that audience to rebuild the business to be super valuable is the more turnaround side of it. And when you look at something that is robust, like the fantasy sports, as the NFL season comes, which will be your next big burst, right? We actually have a lot planned for it this year. I was curious, how much of the goal is to use this opportunity to introduce those users to other things you have, versus give them new things around what they already are coming for? I mean, what you'll find is that our individual brands have in some ways different audiences. People who really use Yahoo Finance as their way to make more money and save more money and attract stocks and all that is pretty independent of people who love fantasy or love checking sports scores with Yahoo Sports. I definitely think the secret sauce of Yahoo, especially for advertisers, since we're here, is that, collectively, it's hundreds of millions of people who have a first-party relationship with us, which makes our ad targeting extremely effective. So one Yahoo overall is something that actually is true about the actual business. Getting people to use Yahoo as one point for everything is something that will happen over time, but we're not going top-down in how we go about it. But it sounds like you don't necessarily, at least right now, need to convert people into being like, 'I'm a Yahoo, and I do everything in the Yahoo world.' I think that was the '90s Yahoo, and I think the internet kind of moved past that. That said, we did relaunch the Yahoo homepage in February after months of testing different variations of it because the user base gets pretty locked in with how they do things, and you can really mess it up in the link chain if you change something. So we found one that really worked, and the most interesting thing about it was we went back to adding more portal-like features. Over the years, it'd become kind of just a newsfeed, and we added things back that were more utility-based around weather and other things and found that people love that. So actually, the Yahoo homepage that is more of a place to get things done is probably more the direction we'll head with it than just straight news. Not everything about the way the internet was framed in the beginning was wrong. Right? It's interesting because having competed against the people at Yahoo for the first 20-plus years of my career and taking that eye towards it, working here, you do kind of get an appreciation for how . . . If you go back and look at the 2007 version of the homepage or 2003, there was some magic to that and how it all worked, especially with the way the internet has gone with a lot of slop and misinformation, disinformation, clickbait, and people trying to get you to do things. The fact that it kind of had everything in one place, I don't know, it was maybe taken for granted a little bit. So we actually have taken some inspiration from that. Obviously we try to modernize it. But yeah, we've taken some inspiration from it. So with the generative AI wave, media is changing like crazy. As search engines like Google become more of an answer engine as opposed to a search engine, sites like a lot of yours may see some of their referral traffic decline. At the same time, you have a search business yourselves. And if you follow where that is going to become more of an answer engine, you may encourage the development in that direction in people's habits, which could undercut the other part of your business. I'm just curious how you think about those pieces fitting together. Yeah. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in search, and a lot of what we did back in the day was absolutely moving things towards an answer engine. And so I would say that's not really new. What people know as Google OneBox, a lot of the search engines in the early 2000s were doing, already brought answers like the weather or music lyrics or multimedia or translations directly into the page. So this has always been the case. Now, there are certain kinds of queries called navigational queries. Those are trying to get you directly to a website. I do find it interesting that a lot of the generative . . . A lot of the large language models, they're getting a lot of their traffic and sending it to places that are more canonical. So for ChatGPT, 50% of their citations are Wikipedia. For Perplexity, almost 50% are Reddit. And so those are more evergreen, deeper, almost more educational responses. A lot of Yahoo's content is real-time, stock prices, sports scores. So for us personally, we operate in a kind of a different space. But you don't expect that referral traffic to decline? So a couple things. So one is I actually strongly believe that the role of search is not to take traffic from the open web, but to send traffic. And in our case, Yahoo's been doing that for over two decades. We have relationships with all of our publishers where we share revenue, we send traffic downstream. And so I actually think that's part of what Yahoo's always done really well is help create a healthy ecosystem. That was also part of the bargain of the open web for search, that you would make yourself available to the engine that would then send you traffic downstream. Having that traffic get cut off and just subsuming that data to then keep it for yourself was not part of that grand bargain. I think we're in the early days of figuring out how that's going to go. What I actually think will happen in search over time, because I think we're still in the primordial phase here of what AI versions of search will look like, is that the page will respond to your query and to what the search engine knows about you personally to have a different version of the search results page depending on the query type and depending on you. And so you're never going to get the same kind of response to each one of these. I personally really believe that it should ultimately wind up sending traffic downstream to the sources, and little citation links probably are not going to do that.
Daily Mail
13-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Free email pioneer Yahoo has clever play to retake crown from Gmail
Yahoo Mail is getting a glow-up — and it's all about helping younger users blitz through their inboxes faster than ever. Although no longer the account du jour, Yahoo — the pioneer of free mass-market email — is putting itself at the forefront of implementing AI features to lure in younger users. Yahoo has launched 'Catch Up' designed to help users speed-read and sort their emails with minimal effort. Yahoo says it's part of the biggest upgrade to its email system in a decade, as it aims to win over a new generation of users who believe in working smarter, not harder Gen Z and millennials are one of Yahoo's fastest-growing demographics and already make up half of its Mail users. The new gamified tool will allow users to see a preview and summary before being given the option to 'delete' or 'keep in inbox'. Although Yahoo was first in the game, Gmail soon began poaching its users with a more user-friendly interface. The company lost even more customers after a massive data breach in 2013 exposed around 3 billion of its users information. 'People have been writing off or predicting the death of email for years,' Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone told Bloomberg. 'But it has an incredibly consistent role in people's lives, both at home and work.' Lanzone, who was brought in to restructure the company in 2021, believed AI will be 'incredibly important to almost every product that we operate.' 'We just want AI working quietly in the background to simplify tasks across all the products that we operate from search to mail to finance to news,' he said. 'We don't want to ask people to have to engage or take an extra step or learn a new behavior.' Lanzone told the publication that Yahoo is also 'vintage', something that will help it stand the test of time. 'We're just getting started because we believe there's a lot of innovation that can be done. 'There is so much more on our roadmap,' he added. Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has warned of mass unemployment The relentless march of AI continues to thrill investors and unnerve others. Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic recently warned the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. The billionaire said AI could also soon raise unemployment to 10 to 20 percent. He said the government and AI companies should stop 'sugar-coating' the job apocalypse on the horizon. Meanwhile, the FBI is warning Gmail users about a dangerous ransomware scheme that could hold your private data hostage. Medusa ransomware group has already victimized over 300 targets using phishing scams to exploit unprotected software in the users' digital devices.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
Snapchat finally has a watchOS app after a decade
There's finally a Snapchat app for watchOS, bringing the social media platform to Apple's line of wearables. This has been a long time coming, given that the first Apple Watch graced our wrists over a decade ago. The app lets users preview incoming messages and reply by using the keyboard, scribbling with a finger, voice dictation or sending out an emoji. Apple Watch wearers could already preview a Snapchat message by enabling them on an iPhone, but there wasn't a way to respond until now. Snapchat says the app will be useful when doing things like alerting friends when arriving at a restaurant or when sending out a quick reply during a run. A company representative told us that it's good for people who want to "keep active conversations going while they're on the go." They also indicated that previewing a message on an Apple Watch will not mark it as "read" on the mobile or web app, as it only shows the first 100 characters. The app cannot be used to view images or videos, but the company plans to "evolve the experience over time." Despite coming ten years after the Apple Watch first launched, Snapchat has still outpaced many of its rivals. There isn't a dedicated Facebook app for the wearable, or a WhatsApp release. Facebook Messenger did have an app once upon a time, but it was pulled. Snapchat's watchOS app comes just ahead of this year's WWDC event. Rumors indicate that Apple is planning on some major announcements throughout the event, including a complete redesign of its various operating systems and new Apple Intelligence features that I'm sure everyone will just love. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Engadget's parent company Yahoo, joined the board of directors at Snap on September 12, 2024. No one outside of Engadget's editorial team has any say in our coverage of the company.
WIRED
21-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Yahoo Is Still Here—and It Has Big Plans for AI
Mar 21, 2025 10:00 AM Even as Yahoo turns 30, CEO Jim Lanzone says the company is still in 'building mode.' Jim Lanzone, chief executive officer of Yahoo, during the MMA Global Possible Conference in Miami, Florida. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: EvaIn September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless caretaker (high bar alert) in a long series of management shifts. Visiting him at the company's offices in New York City, I ask him why he took the job. 'I love turnarounds,' he says. This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. Lanzone's résumé confirms that. In 2001 he took over a sagging search property called AskJeeves—its share price was less than a dollar, down from a high of $196—and built it back to the point where Barry Diller's IAC Corp bought it for $1.85 billion. At CBS Interactive and then CBS's chief digital office during the 2010s, he yanked the stuffy Tiffany network into the streaming age. Yahoo, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, might be his biggest challenge yet. Its history is pocked with missed opportunities, which explains in part why a public company once worth well over $100 billion was sold to a private equity firm for $5 billion in 2021. Yahoo famously passed on buying Google, and actually got Mark Zuckerberg to tentatively agree to sell Facebook for $1 billion before then CEO Terry Semel asked to renegotiate, which squelched the deal. Talent that walked out Yahoo's door included the founders of WhatsApp. Promising acquisitions like Flickr, Tumblr and Huffington Post were ditched at fire-sale prices. In recent years Yahoo was a low-priority property for its owner, Verizon. Instead of trying to revive its purple glory, it merged Yahoo's assets with those of another failed icon, AOL, and dubbed the new brand Oath. Some pegged Lanzone's chances at zero. 'It's hard to believe anyone else on the planet wants any part of his role, ' wrote George Bradt, one of those MBA types who churn out content for Forbes. Lanzone saw something different. In his view, Yahoo was an unacknowledged gem. 'If you were able to take the name Yahoo off of it and look at the business in 2021, you saw billions in revenue,' he says. Lanzone has little patience for exhuming past blunders. 'I think the story of Yahoo's missed opportunities is tired,' he says. 'It's boring.' Instead of crying over lost search glory, Lanzone concentrated on improving what Yahoo did. 'We didn't have to worry about what we weren't,' he says. He got rid of money-losing units, like some nonperforming ad tech divisions, and quietly made some acquisitions to bolster the best properties, like Wagr, a sports betting app, to bring Yahoo Sports into the gambling age. He also brought in capable executives like former ESPN digital head Ryan Spoon, who now heads Yahoo Sports. He's boosted profits and grown the company's audience to the point where he says that Yahoo has performed the quickest return of any Apollo acquisition. Since Yahoo is private, the actual financials aren't available. But Yahoo's comms team provided me with a lengthy document packed with data to bolster Lanzone's claim that Yahoo still has something to yodel about. Comscore, a marketing company that measures traffic, ranks Yahoo No. 1 in news, No. 1 in finance, and No. 3 in sports. It's second only to Gmail in mail. He tells me that in the US alone, 'hundreds of millions' of people use Yahoo every month. A year after Lanzone took the job, the entire tech world was turned around by the appearance of ChatGPT. In previous transformations like search, social, and mobile, Yahoo has a near-perfect record of botching these moments. Lanzone says Yahoo won't be creating its own language models or dropping $100 billion on data centers, but he believes the company will seize the moment nonetheless. 'I'd like to automate the word 'AI' so I don't have to say it so much,' he says. Yahoo has in-house machine-learning talent and draws on outside companies for AI technology. For instance, it partners with the startup Sierra for robot customer service agents. One of Lanzone's canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. 'Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,' Lanzone says. 'Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.' Systrom approves. 'We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,' he says. Next up for an AI-driven remake is Yahoo Finance, the leader among consumer investment tools and arguably the company's crown jewel. Lanzone says he's already gotten a boost from product refinements. Yahoo is no longer trying to compete with CNBC on finance news, he says, and is focusing more on data. But a bigger reinvention is in the works. 'You're going to make more money, you're going to save more money, and we will use AI to do that for you,' he says. I'm not sure, though, that when we use a Yahoo service like Finance or Weather that it means a sudden affection for the color purple, which the company still uses in its branding. When I suggest that Yahoo is less than the sum of its parts, Lanzone pushes back, saying that a Yahoo Finance user will get drawn into the Yahoo-sphere and use other services. Bolstering the effort is a nod to 2025 behavior: Yahoo has made deals with over 100 influencers to help establish it as a home for viral content. In a sense, he says, the company is returning to its early mission of delivering the bounty of the internet to a mass audience. In a symbolic reunion, he recently hosted cofounder Jerry Yang at an all-hands, implying a restored legacy. 'Why were people coming to Yahoo as a portal? Why did they love it so much? Why was it so useful to them?' he asks. 'You can actually serve the users' daily needs, which starts the minute they wake up with weather and news, and then the things they need to know and their communications tools.' Silicon Valley's general belief is that all those things will soon be satisfied by near-omniscent chatbot agents, not homepages. Lanzone wields Yahoo's uptrending metrics and says not so fast . Lanzone is coy about his endgame. 'Yahoo is the same as any late-stage pre-IPO company,' he says. 'For that, there are only three outcomes: you get bought, there's an IPO, or you stay private forever. We have nothing to announce—we're in building mode.' But you don't need a betting app to handicap those outcomes. Staying private forever seems unlikely: When Apollo made the sale, partner Reed Rayman, who is now Yahoo's chair, said Lanzone would 'steward Yahoo through a transformational stage.' In the current bummed-out financial environment, a near-term IPO doesn't seem in the cards. But if the Trump administration decides to sleep on merger oversight, one of the giants might snap up the company. Remember when Microsoft tried to buy the struggling company for almost $50 billion in 2008? Note that Microsoft already handles Yahoo's search index and much of its generative AI. For now, Lanzone seems happy to continue the turnaround. Around a decade ago, Yahoo made a long-term deal with the 49ers mandating that after every touchdown, the screens would show the Yahoo exclamation point and lead the crowd in the yodel made familiar by countless TV ads. Soon after Lanzone became CEO, he was in the stands when Christian McCaffrey scored, and 80,000 people yodeled approval. One doubts they were thinking about portals and turnarounds, but Lanzone thought otherwise. 'It just hit me,' he says 'There's a lot of latent love for this brand.'
