Can Yahoo’s brand rise again?

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Jim Lanzone: The top level brand of Yahoo, the general public, but especially in Silicon Valley, know that the brand has gone through a lot, that the company went through a lot over the years. But then on an individual basis, they’ll be like, “Oh, but I love Yahoo Fantasy. I use Yahoo Finance every day. It’s my homepage.” It is a turnaround in a lot of ways. In some ways, we’re just standing the company back up. But yeah, I think people probably are not really understanding the breadth and depth of how successful it still is.

Bob Safian: That’s Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. I wanted to talk to Jim during a critical inflection point in Yahoo’s journey. The prevailing narrative is that Yahoo is in need of a, quote, turnaround, yet several of its products dominate their category. So what would it take for Yahoo to regain its luster from years ago?

We also discuss AI’s impact on Yahoo’s search business, what lessons Jim brought to Yahoo from his time running Tinder, and how Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports intersects with a booming sports gambling market. For anyone eager to rejuvenate a brand or business, Jim’s experience makes for vital listening, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo. Jim, great to be here with you.

LANZONE: Good to be here. This is awesome.

Copy LinkRebuilding Yahoo as a brand with lasting value

SAFIAN: Yeah. We are meeting here in person today in the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. And I understand that last night you held a big alumni event for Yahoo’s 30th anniversary. The Yahoo brand is… It’s kind of unique. It’s this early internet darling as a search engine, one of the few that lasted of those brands, right? But not a trillion-dollar brand like some-

LANZONE: It’s been through a lot. It’s been through a lot over the years.

SAFIAN: Is that heritage… Is that an advantage or a disadvantage?

LANZONE: Well, it’s an advantage starting from where we’re starting from. So we acquired the company at the end of 2021. Apollo, which is the world’s biggest private equity firm, bought the company. I came in. A bunch of my new team came in with it.

So the advantage is you can’t… Building a brand like Yahoo from scratch is extremely expensive. It’s a very well-known brand. Our individual brands, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Fantasy Sports, Yahoo Mail, these are all used by hundreds of millions of people a month, so you can’t replicate that very easily. And I do think the vintage heritage nature of the brand, there’s a lot of latent love for the brand in there. Our job is to create way better products than have traditionally been part of Yahoo over the years. That’s what we’re busy doing. And if you do that, rebuilding this brand and taking advantage of that latent affection is the game.

SAFIAN: You ran a Super Bowl ad this year.

LANZONE: First time in 23 years.

Copy LinkLeveraging nostalgia and clever marketing choices

SAFIAN: But there was some nostalgia in your choice with Bill Murray answering emails live.

LANZONE: Yes.

SAFIAN: Right?

LANZONE: Yes.

SAFIAN: Was the ad worth the cost? How do you know what kind of impact it’s had?

LANZONE: I mean, look, rebuilding a brand… Firstly, on the internet, you can’t do it without great products, so most of our investment goes into that. If you do that, and we’re just in phase one or two of that process, then you have something to work with in terms of marketing, getting back out there. I would just call the Super Bowl ad, we did one brick in the wall of what we’re doing to build a brand. That’s going to take a long time, and we understand that.

But also, the way we did the Super Bowl ad was very different. We actually bought the ad locally, so it was not a national ad, so it was much more cost-effective. It only hit the top 20 markets in the US, which is actually 50% of the US. And we relied on the rest of it to happen over social and other places.

The ad is only 15 seconds, invited people to enter into an offline story exchange with him, email exchange with him. And if you did that, you would get a series of more videos from Bill. So it wound up being the number four most viewed Super Bowl ad on YouTube, even though we only hit half the country. And it wound up being the seventh highest most trending ad on all of YouTube the next day. So pretty cost-effective.

Plus, millions of people tuned in at halftime up against Kendrick Lamar to watch Bill answering emails live. And we only put the word out on that 20 minutes before it happened. It was amazing to see how many people tuned in. Probably because they love Bill Murray, but that’s part of it.

SAFIAN: Well, but that was a good choice on your part. And doing the buy locally, was it less than half of the price to reach-

LANZONE: Oh, yeah.

SAFIAN: … half of the-

LANZONE: Oh, much more. Yeah. And so probably next year we’ll have some competition for that-

SAFIAN: Yes.

LANZONE: … since we kind of-

SAFIAN: You’ve identified a-

LANZONE: It’s a trick you can only use one time.

SAFIAN: That’s right. That’s right.

LANZONE: But, yeah, it worked out great. And again, we weren’t doing a hard sell of any of our products in that app. We were more just doing something cool and interesting for users who hadn’t heard from Yahoo in a while. So that’s how we did it.

Copy LinkModernizing Yahoo’s products for a new era

SAFIAN: So I wanted to ask you, you talk about it like Yahoo is sort of 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, as you mentioned, 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.

LANZONE: 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. I’ve been doing a fantasy league where I’ve been destroying Jeff Berman of Masters of Scale-

SAFIAN: Oh, yeah.

LANZONE: … for many, many years on Yahoo Fantasy Football. So that was all true.

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 standalone 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.

SAFIAN: 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?

LANZONE: Yeah.

SAFIAN: In August.

LANZONE: We actually have a lot planned for it this year.

SAFIAN: Yeah. Well, I was curious, how much of the goal is, you use this opportunity to introduce those users to other things you have, versus give them new things around what they already are coming for?

LANZONE: 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.

And by the way, if you think about other companies like that, there’s Google as Google and YouTube and Android, and they’re all different, Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp. And we’re kind of similar in that way except for AOL are Yahoo branded.

Copy LinkRe-shaping Yahoo for the modern web

SAFIAN: 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.”

LANZONE: 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.

SAFIAN: Not everything about the way the internet was framed in the beginning was wrong. Right?

LANZONE: 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.

SAFIAN: 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.

LANZONE: 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 than-

SAFIAN: But you don’t expect that referral traffic to decline as…

LANZONE: 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.

SAFIAN: Yes.

Copy LinkNavigating search, referral traffic, and the AI wave

LANZONE: 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.

SAFIAN: But, I mean, I remember at Fast Company we would spend a lot of time doing SEO, right?

LANZONE: Yeah.

SAFIAN: How do you make-

LANZONE: Still happens.

SAFIAN: … sure search comes my way? But there’s this question that like, “Well, is that really going to be there?” For that part of your business, it doesn’t particularly worry you?

LANZONE: Well, not for us because we don’t do that kind of content. So I think anybody who is spamming search engines through SEO to get certain kinds of traffic on topics like Clam Chowder Day, that is not what they really do.  The query is not about the news they’re really breaking or the context that they’re really providing.

And Yahoo really resides in the contextual area. We have the number one NBA podcast. We have the number one combat sports podcast. We have the number one morning sports newsletter. They’re all providing unique context. They’re not trying to rank on Google for a certain query.

And of course, we do have SEO traffic for Yahoo, but it’s not the lifeblood of what we do. And I think anybody who is existing that way… And certainly over time a lot of businesses were created that did that. I think there’ll be more at threat. Anyone creating truly original content, whether what you’re doing that here, Fast Company, obviously, does amazing content, are going to be okay. But I do think the relationship with the engines is still being figured out, and I don’t think it’s been the priority of large language models to date. They’ve been more consuming that data.

By the way, we get hit thousands of times a day ourselves with people trying to hit us no matter what notices we send out asking them not to. I think that will likely all get worked out.

SAFIAN: Jim’s right that as technology and user habits evolve, new rules are being written every day. But how specifically is AI rewriting today’s business models? And for Yahoo itself, what’s the line between fantasy sports and sports gambling? We’ll get to that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Yahoo CEO, Jim Lanzone shared how the company is working to rejuvenate its brand. Now Jim shares what’s surprisingly similar about running Yahoo versus Tinder and why Yahoo acquired an AI aggregator to amplify its news business. Let’s dive back in.

You’ve run media businesses before Yahoo. Obviously, you were CEO of CBS Interactive we were talking about earlier, Chief Digital Officer. You’ve seen business models shift before. Are the shifts that are coming with AI just the latest round of this, or is there something qualitatively different about how AI impacts the business models?

LANZONE: I mean, my question would be what model are we talking about? Because to date, they’ve gone subscription, which in some weird way is more like the streaming services that my team created, or like Netflix, in terms of how much that can scale. Obviously, some of them have been experimenting with ads. They really have not been direct response ads so far, which is the lifeblood of search advertising-

SAFIAN: Yes.

Copy LinkIntegrating AI and strategic acquisitions at Yahoo

LANZONE: … and why Google is the best business model in the history of business models. There has to be a direct response exchange on certain kinds of queries. So I think that they need to get there on that. Everything I’ve read is that they’re all open and trying to figure that out, but just hasn’t been a priority yet.

But to even have a business like this that is so expensive to create, there has to be a model on the other side. They can’t all be nonprofits forever. But I actually don’t think there’s been that much experimentation yet in what these AI businesses are going to look like and how they’re going to monetize.

Anthropic has basically been completely enterprise. OpenAI makes a lot of its money through enterprise or through a subscription service, which, again, I would say is more like… You know what I mean? Evernote’s a subscription service. So what is the model ultimately?

But I do think advertising is… What is it, a third of global GDP? I mean, it has to work out that it’s part of the bargain, especially because people are price sensitive. If you look at the streaming services themselves, people will pay $4 less per month to see a version with ads. And you would think, “Oh, maybe they’re not that price-sensitive,” but it’s actually not true. Over half of all streaming viewers are choosing the ad version for that reason. So something is going to give there.

SAFIAN: And for you in running Yahoo, how is AI impacting… I mean, I saw you bought a news aggregator, right?

LANZONE: Yeah, we bought Artifact. Yeah.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

LANZONE: That was created by the founders of Instagram. And they tried to take a crack at news. There are two categories in Silicon Valley that people just can’t help going after. One is music, and one is news, because that’s what they use, and they get passionate about it. And music does not have a great business model, and they ultimately figure that out. And news is just very hard at this point in the world to create one that has true scale.

And I think Kevin and Mike, and Mike is now the Chief Product Officer of Anthropic, built an amazing product with Artifact. They’re very out in front of AI and machine learning and personalization. And so they just decided that they weren’t going to invest more. And I reached out and said, “Okay, well, maybe we could have a deal here where we could take it.” So it became the basis of our Yahoo News app, which had a huge user base, but really needed to improve. Interestingly, instead of integrating Artifact into Yahoo News, we actually took Artifact and made it Yahoo News, and so that became-

SAFIAN: And Artifact is like an aggregator of news from-

LANZONE: Aggregator, but deep AI machine learning for suggestions and recommendations and topic aggregation and personalization. So yeah, it was a small acquisition, but really impactful, especially early for us in helping us improve our algorithms, including on Yahoo.com.

The other ways, we’ve gone at AI from the beginning. We’re too small to be building a large model ourselves, so we more have been using them to extract value on a product feature basis. So we’re very early on Yahoo Mail with something you’ve seen now from most services in terms of summarizing your mail, helping you write mail, search mail, all that. It’s a part of fantasy sports and helping you figure out who to pick and set your line up. It’s part of Yahoo Finance, helping you figure out what to invest in.

Our DSP, which is our ad tech business, helping people create campaigns and optimize them on an automated basis. So we’ve built AI into the lifeblood of every product that we operate, and I’d say we still have some more shots on goal to take on AI that we have kind of in motion behind the scenes, but kind of too early to talk about.

SAFIAN: You ran Tinder as CEO-

LANZONE: Briefly

SAFIAN: … for a hot minute-

LANZONE: Hot minute.

SAFIAN: … before taking over Yahoo.

LANZONE: Yeah.

Copy LinkLessons from running Tinder and applying them at Yahoo

SAFIAN: Are there any lessons or similarities between Tinder and Yahoo?

LANZONE: So as a product person, and my whole background is in internet products, I think the interesting thing is how similar consumer internet businesses actually are from the mechanics of it, like the lever-pulling of it. The last mile to the customer is different, if it’s fantasy football, if it’s dating, even if it’s search. But the core of building an app, distributing an app, monetizing an app, I think those are all fairly, interestingly, consistent.

At the end of the day, it’s technically, I guess, a marketplace of people versus shoes or versus something else. If you just look at it as an engineer would, it probably has a lot of similarities. Now, that last model of the customer is extremely different, right?

SAFIAN: Yeah.

LANZONE: It’s probably the most intimate, personal, important thing in somebody’s entire life. I think Tinder, what I learned very quickly going there, is just how misjudged it is, especially by Gen Xers or people who didn’t grow up with dating that it’s a hookup app or whatever, when, actually, it’s the number one source of relationships in the United States, period, because online dating is, and Tinder’s the largest of online dating. And it’s contributed to longer-lasting relationships, more diverse relationships. It’s had this incredible impact.

And it’s an interesting category because, at a certain point, I think it was founded in 2012, it became so saturated that the only new people coming onto the services are the ones going from 17 to 18 years old. And so as a category, it’s interesting, where does it head from there? But its importance and the passion of the team for everything they were doing in the most non-judgmental way possible to help people connect was mind-blowing to go on the inside. I do always realize that you never really understand a company completely from the outside. I had an amazing time there. I thought the team was incredible.

SAFIAN: When you talk about people misunderstanding, in certain ways, Tinder’s brand, are there things that people misunderstand about the Yahoo brand? Are there things that you misunderstood when you came in?

LANZONE: I think I was pretty clear-eyed about it, not only because… I knew a lot about this company. I mean, we looked at buying it in 2016, so I got under the hood back then at CBS. I knew every executive team. I knew the founders. I knew the board members. I mean, I really had a pretty clear view. We also competed with them on a number of fronts, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into.

I think, interestingly, the top level brand of Yahoo, for whatever reason, the general public, but especially in Silicon Valley, know that the brand has gone through a lot, that the company went through a lot over the years, but then on an individual basis, they’ll be like, “Oh, but I love Yahoo Fantasy. I use Yahoo Finance every day. It’s my homepage. And so people probably are not appreciating how good of a company it really is, to your point.

It is a turnaround in a lot of ways. In some ways, we’re just standing the company back up. We were owned by Verizon. We had to set the company back up as a corporation. It was called Verizon Media. We put the name Yahoo back on it. But, yeah, I think people probably are not really understanding the breadth and depth of how successful it still is, you know?

Copy LinkExploring the overlap of fantasy sports and sports gambling

SAFIAN: Yes. I wanted to ask about the fantasy business. There is some, I don’t know, cognitive overlap between fantasy business and sports gambling, sports betting. I’m sure that’s a conversation that’s come up.

LANZONE: Hundred percent.

SAFIAN: Where do you look at that?

LANZONE: So as a service, Yahoo Sports, being number two to ESPN, is utilized by sports bettors a lot to do research, to track games, all of it. And obviously, fantasy, along with ESPN, we’re one of the two largest platforms, so that’s very similar in some ways.

But Yahoo, we inherited a deal Verizon did with BetMGM where all of our betting traffic was sent downstream to them. That deal was up in March of 2026, and we’re in the process now of evaluating our options. It’s going to be the first time Yahoo’s been free to really play the field and do the best deal possible for how we interact with other sports betting platforms or what part of it we do ourselves.

SAFIAN: It’s an interesting choice about whether that’s the business you want to get in. I mean, now, in whatever deal you create, you’re not taking the risk on the betting part of it. You are getting the referral. But if you can be an expert in that other area, maybe there’s an opportunity in that.

LANZONE: Well, it’s a huge business. It’s not going away. And so Yahoo Sports absolutely has a fundamental role to play in that industry, in the online sports betting industry. We also, by the way, at the Venetian Sports Book in Vegas… Today, it’s the Yahoo Sportsbook. And we have a deal with them and are very integrated. Not for the actual betting, but for the viewing on the TVs and all of that. So yeah, there’s something very interesting ahead for there. We’re trying to figure out exactly what it’s going to be.

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Yahoo right now? I mean, are there lessons from the early dot-com boom that Yahoo was part of that applied to today’s AI boom? How do you think about it here?

Copy LinkEmbracing a startup mentality at Yahoo’s next stage

LANZONE: Look, Yahoo had one of the original sins of the internet by giving away search. In June of 2000, they were a portal, and search did not have a business model. And so it was very logical to a company that made its money through banner ads to try and do an enterprise search deal with another company at the best price possible. And that price included a link to Google to send them Yahoo search traffic. And that didn’t turn out very well.

And I do think at any moment in time, the team in charge, the lesson is make sure you’re making the right decisions on all this. You never know what that’s going to be. And when we bought the company in 2021, when Apollo bought it and brought us in, the AI boom hadn’t happened yet. It didn’t happen till… That wasn’t going to happen for another 14 months. So it wasn’t even anticipated to be part of our lives yet.

So it’s the decisions that we make as part of that are what’s going to write the story of the company from here. And in our minds, we still truly feel very new to this. It still feels very early days for our team, and we feel like we’re building something, and have humble origins of how Yahoo got here and what we started with, both good and bad. But I would equate us more to any Silicon Valley pre-IPO company. You get funded venture. We were private equity. Your job is to achieve growth and to turn that into some outcome, whether that’s going public or selling to somebody. You’re not in this to stay private forever and do that, but we’re-

SAFIAN: You may be 30 years old, but you’re like a startup.

LANZONE: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Or at least you want to be.

LANZONE: In some ways, we’re three years old. We just started with a good head start on the assets, but we’re heads down. I mean, we are, quarter to quarter, just following our bliss on our product roadmaps. We have an amazing team now on every front. They all have a bit of a chip on their shoulder like I do in a good way for the task at hand, and some of the things about the brand that make us want to prove to people that we can do this. So we’ll see where it goes from here. We’ll come back and we’ll take a look at how we did.

SAFIAN: Well, Jim, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it.

LANZONE: Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

When Jim took the job at Yahoo, he knew it would be a challenge. In fact, he took it because it would be a challenge. At a moment when many leaders are hedging their bets, trying to be as risk averse as possible, there’s something we can all take from Jim’s embrace of a hard situation. In business and in life, addressing the hard problems is what has the biggest impact. It’s how we grow, how we make a difference, and ultimately how we achieve meaningful satisfaction. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.