YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Lanzone

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-03-16
most recent: 2026-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, Jen, this has been great. I really enjoy talking to you. It's good to talk to another internet OG, both with weird shared histories with AOL. I got to say, there's more of that burbling beneath the surface of this episode than anyone can possibly know. But I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for being on Doder.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It all would have to go at once because this, it really is an ecosystem. The average Yahoo user uses two or more of our products. And they do, as we've talked about, send traffic to each other. And it's part of the data goldmine is because we have all of them together. And I think in the context of all the other companies out there, we're still incredibly undervalued for what we bring to the table. I really think because the brand is Yahoo, in some ways it's part of why we're as big as we are. In other ways, it's still part of the challenge of where we need to go. That is really how we talk about it and look at it and the decisions we're making are for the future IPO. But if anybody is Smart enough. I don't know they let us get there.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of weird news. I get calls all the time because the other part of PE is they kick every tire and they allow every tire to be kicked. So they're always getting phone calls about different parts of Yahoo. But the truth is Yahoo is way stronger together. The thesis originally was maybe you would break these things apart and you could sell finance, you could sell sports, but you would really have to do it on the same day.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that we can be a healthy public company again, where you're not core to quarter struggling, which is, I think, what got Yahoo into trouble in the past, got AOL got into trouble in the past. So we're building towards that for sure. And I think we have longer to go to get to the point where we are truly ready to be public five years after we go public, not just the day we go public. That said, I think the history of PE is that they would probably much rather sell that really is more their model because the cash out is more immediate. They don't have to wait, sell down as the majority owner, and that just creates its own set of problems. So that said, I think we talk a lot about IPO in our board meetings, and the board is much more than just Apollo. And there have been people trying to kick the tires on us, you know, for quite a while, which also, by the way, winds up.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it does tend to be a catnip topic about Yahoo that people are like, oh, when's the IPO? And there's a lot of people out ahead of us who are trillion dollar IPOs that are probably first and others that people are wondering about. I'd say I am building this thing.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You always forget how I know you guys have rules on this, how nothing is off the record in the UK. And I remember I was being interviewed by someone in Cannes. And I don't know. One wrong turn of phrase. And all of a sudden there was an article that we were going public and it made its way to CNBC and it was like not in any way where we were yet.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've listened to a lot of Decoder, I can tell. Private equity usually wants an exit that might look like Yahoo going public again. It might look like an acquisition. Do you have a preferred outcome in mind or do you have a timeline?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I also don't think we're going that way. I think these things are probably at some level here to stay. And that way, I think they're a fundamental part of the next steps people take from our product. So I do think we're a very relevant place for that. At the same time, we're not the right company to operate them ourselves. So you won't see us going down that pathway, most likely. Maybe one of them will try and buy us and munch us into it. But I could see that potentially happening. But otherwise, we're back in the aggregation zone”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the line would be something you'd have to think about more if you were us if we were operating in either space, which again, we looked at including trading and decided we're better as a partner, you know, saying traffic downstream. So maybe it's somewhere do we take ads from beverage companies from Bud Light. It's funny. Do you know why FDR won the 1932 election? It was Andrew Rossorkin's 1929 book. It wasn't the depression. It was prohibition.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, the comparison is to sugar, or I don't know, booze, like both legal, both incredibly popular, and both obviously bad for you in excess. And we've built a lot of norms around excess for sugar and booze. We're just good at it, and people still fall off the edge all the time. There are no norms for prediction markets, really, right? And the insistence that it's not gambling actually keeps a lot of the other norms away. You know, you've talked a lot about your values. And I'm saying it's refreshing to hear you talk about brand and sending traffic to the web. This is a place where I think your values will be under pressure because the norms aren't there. Is there a line for you?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is legal, it's incredibly popular and it's a popular way that people are, you know, we always think about like what's the next step somebody's going to take to accomplish whatever goal they're trying to achieve that day using our products. That actually is a cheesy thing that we talked about and try to build for and are trying to do a better job at always over time. I can't think of a more fundamental next step downstream than going to Fandle or going to Coinbase after what you've learned on Yahoo Sports or Finance. So I do have to have it as a core part of the product. I have to where that heads is going to be decided at rungs up the ladder for me, but I do get your point for sure on it.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to have the odds and you have to have the information. And if you've looked on these properties, Yahoo Sports, ESPN for years, like with Numberfire and all the different ways that you can analyze it, fantasy obviously is a game. It's not gambling, but it's a game, but it is very much part of the spine of the book for what Yahoo Sports is about. So I do look at it as adjacent to that. And I don't want to give a political BS answer. I just also don't want to act like I'm the expert. I know one of your last episodes was on this topic and I listened to the whole thing and I think every argument you guys are making for why something is gambling is a valid argument. And then I also understand the two-way contract side of it and even on the insider trading, there's somebody on the other side betting the other way, betting. So I don't know where it's going to wind up. And if it winds up where this is illegal, then obviously we won't have it.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would have to be a really big check. I don't think it is out there. At this point, it really is information in a link. I think sports odds are incredibly fundamental. I've been in a college betting pool with all my friends from UCLA for 20 years.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone thinks it's rigged and Taylor Swift won her first Super Bowl. That makes no sense to me. It's the presence of the gambling that has led to the perception of corruption. And even though the leagues know it, even though the players are starting to get caught up in like sting operations, the money is so convincing that that's a problem. And now it's going to happen to news. The prediction markets are coming for the news organizations, for the aggregators. They're partnering with Reuters. Like something else is going to happen where you have insider trading betting on news at scale right now. You operate in these verticals, you're talking about your responsibility. You're talking about making the algorithm neutral. Here is the pressure and not just the pressure, the money from your PE owner that runs casinos. There's a real back and forth here, and I don't know if anybody has really thought about the lines. I'm asking you, where's the line? Because you could turn all of Yahoo into gambling tomorrow based on the assets you have and the pressures that exist in the world.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm just more, I mean, you have a long history here. I'm just asking maybe just about vibes, right? Finance, maybe the stock market has always been gambling, right? Some people would make that argument. Maybe it's always been gambling, but the idea historically is you should turn on CNBC and look at the fundamentals of a company and invest in a company you think is going to grow for real. And we've kind of just let that be gambling now, right? That's what meme stocks have done to finance in a very specific way. Crypto maybe was just always gambling and we pretended it was going to be bigger than it was. And now crypto is part of finance and now it's like even more gambling. Sports was not supposed to have any gambling at all, right? There was like the reason the leagues kept gambling away and then the money is infected sports and now everyone thinks there's an NFL script and all the games are rigged. And you can see players are getting in trouble.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just announced a deal with Coinbase as well, where we are linking to them for, you know, if you're going to be buying stocks or crypto”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Venetian Plazo is the Yahoo sports book. Now we don't operate it. It's a branding thing and there's our content everywhere or whatever. We have had discussions since I got here about whether, because they are experts at it much more than we are, should we do what fanatics has done and get into the bloodbath of gambling and should we do it ourselves? And we decided no that our, you know, not only is that a huge cost sink and it's already so far along, you're battling it out to be eighth in the state of Iowa. We'll stay away from that. We'll be a distributor and we'll be the top of the funnel for all of those. That's historically what we inherited about BedMGM. That's where we're going to play going forward. In some ways those are ad deals. You know, if you really think about it, we will incorporate odds and we'll incorporate some of the more news driven things around the betting odds about a certain topic as a news item. But we don't operate in either space.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the extent everybody does, then yes. And by the way, we do that in all kinds of places. We really try extremely hard to be purple with news. Now, the algorithm may take you left or right over time. It's partially our job to help reset that every now and then so you don't get too far down the rabbit hole. And you can see more neutral sources. I get complaints all the time from both the left and the right. So it probably means we're doing that right. I do think that's an important responsibility. I don't know if you know this, but Apollo historically owned Caesars and currently owns the Venetian and the Palazzo. And the sports book at”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say politics aside, the sort of bipartisan nature of people feeling weird about sports gambling is unprecedented in my lifetime. Next to that is we should just bet on anything. And then next to that, you actually mentioned it earlier. You came to Yahoo with crypto and then Stonx and now there's just gambling. All of that has always felt like gambling to me, right? Crypto has always felt like one form of gambling. Stonx was like, what if we just gamble by doing Reddit threads until GameStop goes to the moon? And now we're just at what if we just gamble on the outcome of the war? There's a pretty linear connection between all these ideas and how people feel about gambling. You run finance, which is home of Stonks. You run sports, which could be the home of sports betting. Do you feel like you have an obligation to buffer against everyone's worst instincts here?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To end by talking about finance and sports, new fantasy products are great. The action in sports is, boy, you should just bet on sports now, right? You can see it with all these prediction markets. That is their big business. They have a lot of money to throw around. They've captured a bunch of lobbyists. There's”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have new products coming. We launched three new fantasy products last year, one of which was a huge traffic driver. And we had the biggest year of fantasy ever. So it's like every one of those is a surface area to which we can bring an audience that can trial, scout, and hopefully it goes from there.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dream would be that they then start to prefer us for search and bookmark us and decide to go to us instead of one of the other guys. And for the people already using it, their usage is increasing. So more queries per day per user. So I know we're on to something with that. And I do hope that it gets there. But part of the thesis of the business plan for this was we have a huge user base just like Google does, but in a smaller version, the poor man's version of being able to distribute the same way they've done what AI mode and put it on all the different surface areas. So that is the homepage and news and sports and fancy sports and every single version of that”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just be clear that your plan there is you're going to grow the overall Yahoo user base more Gen Z people are gonna sign up for Yahoo Mail and you're gonna capture some of that search activity instead of trying to take direct share from Google search”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first draft of Scout is really we've gotten a lot of great feedback on the UI and we have a lot of things that we want to add to it and improve about it. But I think we came out with a good first attempt and we'll tweak it from here.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm curious to see that evolves. I'm dying to see how you try to solve it because it doesn't seem like anybody knows yet. And search advertising is most lucrative business in the history of the world. So it feels like if that's up for grabs.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very curious to see how these user interfaces evolve. I'm watching every day ChatGPT has a new RIF and you can tell they haven't figured it out because it's hard to make it native. And that's really what everybody wants is for this to feel native. And even the 10 blue links have not been 10 blue links on Google for a long time. There's a lot of embedded native experiences.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is helpful on commercial queries. You know, I don't know if you remember, but Alta Vista tried to launch search advertising and were shut down by the industry and ads and articles and wired saying, how dare you before Overture kind of made it okay before Google AdWords came along and then really Streamlined it. And I think that issue has been asked and answered already. Users are okay with it in commercial categories. It's just about how you bring it over. And I actually think there's a way to do it that's keyword driven, that is rendered in a way that is in this new format that users might prefer. So that is where we're headed. And that's the product I would like to launch and see if it gets there. But if Google doesn't get that right, it will be difficult.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, frankly, I will do something very similar once we're through this beta period of distributing it through scout through Yahoo. But I do think it's their game to lose. I think the one thing that is existential for them is making sure that however this goes is that search advertising crosses the chasm into this new hybrid answer engine world. I do not think that products that take nine steps of a gentic whatever to monetize some outcome are going to be anywhere near as efficient as you know as you clicking on links and them getting paid. And obviously the world is headed towards outcomes over time anyway, but it has to find a way. I think the UI that we launched lends itself to where that might head in a way that would not cause Anthropic to do a Super Bowl ad about us. I think you can do it in a way that is very clearly paid.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Danny was the figurehead of search and ran the biggest search conference and all the SEOs who didn't have their names and their business cards would be outside smoking and hanging out with Mac cuts and all that whole generation. Danny then ultimately went to work for Google and is like an evangelist for them. I've seen a presentation that he gave where he is singing the praises of the open web and how important it is. And I am positive that they would have done more to take that on if they had been able to drive the conversation of the UI of this thing. If you've looked at it, I mean, a very small percentage of ChatGPT, of Google users have actually used ChatGPT. I think similar web put that stat out on Twitter where I saw it. Much smaller than you would think. So their opportunity, and this is why they look so much like ChatGPT, is to and why AI mode is embedded everywhere.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, I still think of Yahoo as being on the same, you know, to think that we would be able to take advantage of Google at this point. I think we have further to go, but I think they're in a very strong position. I think that they really were surprised by the launch of ChatGPT and that was a generationally important product. I think Google probably had it in their labs working the same way.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other big bad in all this is Google. We've brought them up several times. Google has a big DSP. They compete in all the areas you're competing. They aggregate a bunch of news. Google Discover is the secret referrer to half of my competitors. They will never admit it, but it's true. They're in a lot of trouble, right? There's a bunch of antitrust cases about their ad tech stack, about search in general. I don't know how that's going to play out in the end, but they're under a particular kind of pressure. Do you see that as an opportunity or do you see the way they run their ad tech stack as a particular kind of threat?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, they're part of our press release for the launch of Scout, and we're going to be doing something at South By together. So that partnership's really good. I hope that it lasts for a long time.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, others have said this that you are tempting fate by opening up a way for consumers to access your product within a large language model. They certainly over time will try to take that on themselves. We've seen that every single time in this industry going back to AOL, to be honest. And we've seen, you know, so I think that is a danger for everybody. And the same way I don't think publishers would have been okay with people just taking their data and republishing the answers without getting traffic back. I think on this topic, people should be very careful on how they partner with a large language model on this going forward because they will cut the big bad wolf will come to your door and say everything's cool. That being said, Anthropic has been an amazing partner. They were really impressed by the McGuy remove that Eric Fang and his team made and how we use Haiku.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason why we're as good as we are is because at our core, we do a really good job in these verticals where we play. And if we can deliver these products that are much better than what we inherited to a user basis large, I think worst case, you know, we are growing that audience at the core. And I don't think we are big enough. I think an anthropic in a OpenAI have we're back to fish, but have much bigger fish to fry than Yahoo. You know, we might be collateral damage in what they try and do. Absolutely. I've known since the start.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, our biggest challenge from here forward right now, because I think we're starting to cook with oil on the product side, is actually brand. You know, I think we've come a long way. We've climbed the mountain a bit and we've made a lot of progress, especially in the industry. I think people know what's going on here. But if we hope to have like a new balance type comeback where the gap or these places that have kind of been down but have made this comeback and become really solid brands again, which is my aspiration for the Yahoo brand, we have further to go to where I think we're really Punching at the weight where I want to be”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how are you thinking about the dynamic, right? You've got this long history, you've got a core vendor in a position that looks a lot like the original sin, right? You're paying a vendor to run the search, but maybe you can swap them out later. And then that vendor is just going to keep growing its capability set. And all the other vendors who are similarly positioned are going to keep trying to grow their capability set. How do you avoid the cliff? Because it feels like it rhymes with the past, as you're pointing out.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're all already trying to do it. Of course, but Google has started to compete more with all of its providers over the years too. So this isn't new”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't see that coming in the history of the consumer internet that each 800 pound gorilla tries to do everything and eat all of its worries.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you've got anthropic, sort of the heart of it. I presume that that means you can take them out, right? If there was a better vendor or a better partner or better deal terms, you could replace that little LLM core and your products would still operate. One of the dynamics in AI generally, though, is that the big models are eating more and more of the capabilities that people are building on top of them.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Results. So it is definitely a much more affordable kind of a MacGyver way of doing it. But it actually, if you wind up Eric Fang, who's the mastermind of this project, who is our head of our research group and head of our search group, would phrase it is that Yahoo Data plus Haiku equals very competitive AI answer engine. And again, we're not going to be doing all the things a large language model can do, but you are very shortly going to see us get into very personalized results. You're going to see us get into very authentic actions that you can take. And with that launch, not only do we launch the scout answer engine at scout.com, but we actually on the day of launch have embedded it within all of our other products.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are working with Anthropic, with their lightweight model called Haiku. And there are a number of these. Actually, ChatGPT used to have one called Nano that they kind of aren't really doing anymore. I've heard they might bring it back, but we're not displaying results from Claude. It's results from our own data that they are processing, essentially. So we send them a payload that is both all this amazing data from our knowledge graph soon to be our user side because we're about to launch personalization. 30 years of search history, all of our vertical content knowledge. And then we also are grounding with Bang. And so that combines into one payload. We send to Haiku. So that's the large language model that is applied in a small parameter way to Yahoo data that sends it back to our rendering engine in the way that you see that we think is really cool and useful and the way that we render.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But are we going to grow in search? I certainly hope so. And if we do, it's going to be because people are doing an infrequent number of searches today when they use it and they see scout and it's awesome and the results are really good compared to what they would get elsewhere. The next time they're on Yahoo for mail or fantasy or check their stocks, they'll do another one. And that really is the beginning of the pathway. Wherever we wind up, I can't get there without that start, you know? There's always going to be the question mark in the middle of underpants gnomes before profit.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For revenue, so that's how we got profitable and grew that company from the brink to selling to IEC. Some of the same things are in effect here. Nobody chooses, you will not be surprised. Yahoo over Google or somewhere else's search. The reason the way that we get our search volume is because we have 250 million US users and 700 million global users in the Yahoo network at any given time. And there's a search box there. infrequently they use it That search has been under threat of moving to LLMs and so we had to evolve that search engine which we've been in partnership with Bing since 2009 and outsourced that and we had to do something to make sure that they kept doing those searches on Yahoo the ones that they were already doing so to do that we had to have AI search and our decision was that as we looked at the landscape we were actually the best people to build it because we actually had the data to build upon to do it and we could do it and we could do it affordably”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, delete. I didn't mean for that to get out there. So, you know, I've been through the search wars. The way that we look, I'm never going to be into worse position than where the Ask Jeeves brand was in 2001 and 2002. And we did grow market share and search. And the way that we did it is that we had a pretty big audience for the time with a completely underperforming product that the original product showed up 85% of the time was when we clicked 25% of the time because it was a hand-coded NLP. It didn't really do it the way NLP works today and through a series of things of improving search and launching what became OneBox on Google and doing all that, what we found is that if somebody was doing 1.5 searches a month on Ask, that if we launched these things, they would just do three searches a month on Ask to start with. That was doubling our search volume and search advertising was linear in terms of what that would do.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny you mentioned that Bing. I remember the Big launch being at the D conference, and this is probably before I realized how Twitter was going to work. And I put some snotty tweet up about when they announced Bang that it was essentially a copy of Ask.com of what we had already built. And Dan Frommer took it and turned it into an article. And I was like, no, no, no, perfect.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are growing Yahoo after 30 years. It's pretty incredible that through all with all it's been through and what you might assume about it, like for example, 50% of Yahoo mail users are Gen Z or millennial. Nobody would assume that. And it's growing, has had one of its best years ever. But the size and scale of it is just very rare. But of course, the surface area for that is mostly not going to be premium video advertising. It's going to be display. And that has its place in the ecosystem. You know, it's not the hottest thing right now, but it converts and has a place.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big brand takeovers, you know, we just sold one yesterday for the World Cup. We've been building deeply into soccer and into motorsports and some other verticals there. But for the most part, it is performance-based. And we are just one of the rare, I don't know, we have to be like top three places to go for really high performing advertising. And it's not the same buyer always. So I'll give an example just because I know he'd be okay with it. A person used to work for me, runs SurveyMonkey, and they were buying through the DSR DSP. And he came to me and said, you know, you got. So it's a different ad format for sure. But again, even native advertising can perform. It's going to perform at a different percentage. But the internet is just a much broader and more vast place than people appreciate.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, it's going to be different for every advertiser. And I've worked in the streaming side of things and had an ad business in that, and you're going to get premium CPMs for brand advertising. It's not, you're not trying to drive people downstream for an outcome. DSP buyers are typically outcome driven. Definitely Yahoo proper buyers are largely outcome driven. We will get”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deal. So we'll see what the partners look like going forward. But the vast majority of our revenue is on the back of our premium properties, either through highly targeted advertising, subscriptions, and then down funnel into search. Which, you know, we can talk about search separately, but yeah.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That information, and you either target on Yahoo proper or you take it to go across when you buy through the DSP. And we just, we are incredible at conversion and outcomes. And that really is one of the why I think Yahoo is still a very underappreciated asset and would be for anybody. We win 9 out of 10 head-to-head tests against people on the DSP side. And again, I think on the Yahoo proper side, it's even bigger. So yes, we are selling premium ads, you know, for March Madness and World Cup on sports. Yes, we're doing partnerships with Polymarket and others. BedMGM has historically been the gambling partner for the last seven years. It was a deal Verizon did that's just coming up at the end of this month finally. Polymarket was just to fill in the blanks of the markets where we didn't have that.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT