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

“We took 25% of Tabula and we outsourced it to them because it was a lot of money. We shut down the SSP. There were people who wanted to buy it, but we didn't want to, we would have had to give them preferential treatment. We wanted to be able to play the field on yield and all of our pages. But the DSP was underinvested in, but was the crown jewel. It was a place where we thought we had a right to win. The vast majority of the impressions through the DSP control center are not Yahoo. It's less than 10%. And you can get anything through there. CTV, Netflix is in there, Spotify is in there. And the differentiator for it is something that's a differentiator for the whole company is when we inherited the company, it was like we discovered oil underneath it, which was this data gold mine of first party data due to the direct relationship. 75% of our DAUs are logged in. And so we really do know our users.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the entire company we inherited was monetized through this group that was a three-headed monster of native advertising, a supply side platform, and a demand side platform. You had to buy all three. And the Yahoo Consumer Businesses had to only get its revenue from that group. So if you think about the SSP, it was the Yahoo SSP. We couldn't go out and play the field on an auction from Trade Desk and from Google and from others. So that was part of the decision there. We were leaving a lot of money on the table on our own consumer properties. The native ad business was just declining over time and something that was taking up a lot of resources. And so we did in one day we did this huge that included an extension of our Microsoft partnership on search advertising, which is another way we make money. We did all of these things. So we extended Microsoft. We shut down the native business.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The homepage or Something to do with the content management system or the monetization. But for the most part, I actually think you'd get pretty unanimous feelings about how we operate together. I think it would all sing from the same playbook. When people interview with us, they always comment about how everyone is kind of speaking off the same playbook. structure together.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well as monetization that goes across that loads up to Matt. Ryan Spoon runs what we call the Yahoo Media Group. And that has today sports, finance. And I've talked publicly that there's a third leg of the stool, which is we definitely probably have a right to go deeper into video in a non-fiction way across the verticals where we're strong. News today rolls into the home business just because they were so intertwined, but theoretically that could be one or the other. And then again, every one of those businesses has a GM who really has the business plan, the P&L, the resources to run their business. And then sidebar to that, we'll have a CFO or the chief revenue officer with the sales team, et cetera. So that is how it's structured. If you were to talk internally, there actually is incredible harmony across those businesses. Yeah, they brawl sometimes over traffic.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe it or not, those are not the divisions. Oh, really? Those are also divisions. So we have GMs on each of those. Some roll up to Matt Sanchez, our COO. So he has the home business, the search business, email, which is in many ways our most important historical business, and our DSP.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know which way to run. And I think our people are just awesome. And I think that was true at the last company. And that's why we succeeded in doing the turnaround and then got to the point where we could launch new products that were really groundbreaking. In that case, it was CBSL Access, which turned into Paramount Plus. Here, you know, who would have thought Yahoo was going to launch an AI search engine? And, you know, we have some other bets that we're making. So I do think the people are what it really comes down to at the end of the day.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, again, I think I don't think efficiency is the name of the game here, it's excellence, you know, and growth. And so you hire great people to do those things. And then I'm, you know, I'm the editor-in-chief at the center of all those. And we do have patriotism across all the brands. It's a lot easier at Yahoo where we have one central brand. But that's the structure. What I'll also say, though, is structure is not everything. And at these big companies, you could be this big matrix board or you could be the GM model that we run. It always comes down to the people. And I honestly think that where you see problems, it's not just the structure. It's not just the culture that you inherited. It really is the people. And what they're good at, if you don't hire real domain experts who have high EQ or are really good teammates to each other and you're going to wind up with a cesspool anyway or people who”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny too because you say all that, and that is the structure we had here. So I inherited this big matrix organization where nobody owned anything. There was one head of content across everything. There was one head of product across everything. And it just, what you lose there is you don't have experts who are focused, who you hire them to be the CEO of their own business and they want that. Every one of my general managers has an entrepreneurial background and usually a product background. They want to run. And you got to let them run and be a little inefficient at the edges by having their own engineering teams, their own design teams, their own content teams. And then we will assign to them, you know, people in sales and marketing and PR who are experts at that area, but who roll up to a central person. And so that model worked amazingly well because you can get real efficiencies at the center and expertise at the center while”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year it just became clear I was holding everything up, you know. I couldn't have 25 direct reports. And so I organized them into groups that were similar with general managers in charge of each business. That structure worked great. And we came to call that federal and state that there were governors of every state that had their own economies, usually their own location, their own culture, and that that was fine. And that at the federal level, you know, there's no reason to have two IRSs or two FEMAs. We could across finance and legal and HR and some other things.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, in that case, it was 60 companies that had been brought together by acquisition, most of which had nothing to do with each other. And they went through a period of trying to turn it with Jack Welch as the advisor, turn it into an operating company with a common back end. And that just didn't work because Ticketmaster had nothing to do with Ask and Search had nothing to do with lending tree or the catalog business. There were just so many different parts of IC that just weren't similar. But in my CBS days, all the brands were consumer internet companies. And at first, because I had been a product, you know, I was always a product leader or founder, I was a pig and slop. I was like, oh, great. These 25 brands all get to report to me, including like the fantasy. You know, I started playing fantasy on sportsline and okay, I get to run that now. And within like a”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it is a conglomerate portfolio structure. I backed into accidentally the structure years ago at another company. This is actually the fourth conglomerate I've been a part of, starting with IEC, which bought SJVs back in the day.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got you to the point where you could earn the right to start improving the products again. Because at the end of the day, we are a product company and these things had to not suck, let alone get to be good. And now we're in, I'd say, the third phase, which is starting to take shots on goal. And so the decisions are always going to be different as I think you go through those phases.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Job of any CEO, even if you're a Series A company. And so that lends for what we're trying to do is pretty easy. I'd say, and we know who we are and what we need to be. And we know what the spine of the book is. And, you know, the pages that are kind of starting to come off of that as we go forward. And the first two years I was here, it was the transformation period. Now we're getting us through COVID and all of that and extracted from Verizon. We actually had to stand this company back up. We're not the same Yahoo. This is a new company that PS Jerry Yang invested in. He was one of our investors that we put the name Yahoo back on. So all the transformation work that happened the first couple of years.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food company, but I've done consumer internet my entire career. I've started them. I've taken over big ones. I've seen kind of everything you could see in this industry. And it's very easy to make decisions. I think it's harder to get the information for it. I think my team would tell you that I'm very quick to make decisions. I would rather they have done it themselves. And we can talk about the org structure and why that is. kind of the editor-in-chief myself for what happens here. The framework is definitely through the lens of our mission. I don't have a set of like Enron values on the wall, like integrity that mean nothing. We have a view on that as well. So that's not really how it happens. But it really is through the lens of why we're here, what we're trying to do, what our plan is for the year. My job at the end of the day is growth. You could dress that up any way you want. That is my job. I think that's.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having watched your podcast for a long time, I know that question was coming, and I just didn't want to come up with some bullshit answer. The answer is honestly, because I've heard some and they sound like, you know, they're trying to write a chapter for Peter Drucker or something. I'm just not going to try and do that. I think if you'd done this a long time, and I'm the wrong CEO for enterprise software company, I'm the wrong CEO for”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, very profitable. And look, we don't disclose revenue, but it's in the billions. That number's moved around as I've moved out a lot of bad revenue with those ad tech companies that are driving a lot of top line, but not a lot of bottom line. AOL was a lot of revenue and profit. And that went out.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's agreed upon every year in our planning process what that's going to be. And certainly when we made the changes to the revenue engine, it was a little dicey there for a year. That was the Indiana Jones replaced the gold situation. They had to take a leap of faith with us on that. But yeah, we've not Been through any PE driven cost reduction exercises or anything yet.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I mean, if you think, if you go back to when I started, it was still the heart of COVID and the crypto boom and stonks. And there was one kind of boom period and then things dried up for a bit and then AI boom. And we've kind of gone through this. And so what we've looked at doing with that capital has been different. We've wound up buying smaller things along the way instead of bigger things, but they've been very up for the bigger things and trying to make this a much bigger outcome along the way. We have tended to make our own fuel. I promise you there's not been one reduction here that hasn't been strategically decided by my team. We shut down two really big money-losing ad tech parts of the company. That was all our team, you know, trying to do that. So we are, I'd say, profitable to very profitable. And we don't need to make a dollar more than our budget to satisfy the PE guy.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you met Reed, you wouldn't think about it like that. You wouldn't know. We have a deal team that's not like that at all. And I don't know about it. No, they've really always wanted to kind of swing, you know, bigger. And I'd say in the early days.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things. One is that they actually have been, in fact, I was in a meeting this morning where they were offering capital to do big things that we were talking about.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compete with them with those assets. Let's see how that Olympic race goes. We wanted to try that. And so, you know, look, it was Know almost 30 years in the making, I was getting at a very different time than if I'd gotten it in 2010 or 2005 or some other time. But the assets were still extremely strong. And yeah, I do also understand the part your question, which is PE. And, you know, do people in my position normally want to go do that? I've been an entrepreneur. I've started two companies. I've worked for media moguls. I've done all kinds of things. And my view on that is just You always got to serve somebody. And it's your board. It's the public markets. It's a really hard boss, whoever it is. And I felt like Reed Raymond, who is the partner at Apollo, who did the deal, was really smart, a really good guy, and that we would be really good partners, whether private equity was behind it.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've just grown to love doing them. And in my case, I wanted to run towards the fire. I was very much of the mind that if you could get it for the right price, that it was a great deal to do. And so once that deal closed, the conversation immediately turned to whether I would be interested in running it. And I definitely was. So there was no pitch deck other than my advice and input along the way to buying it. And then over that summer before they closed, it wound up being a negotiation of me coming on to run it. And, you know, I'd been at other companies where we had talked to ourselves, like, oh, I wish we could take our executive team over there.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They bought it in May of 21. It closed in September of 21. And they talked to a lot of different people around the industry, people that you know that I know about doing diligence on Yahoo and whether they should buy it. I competed against Yahoo for basically every stop of my career. I knew every executive team. I, you know, went head to head with them over the years. I always thought I'd partner with them on certain things over the years. I always thought it was the granddaddy of all turnarounds. And I've been part of a few of them.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can provide great content. In sports and finance, it's also a little bit different in that not only are we aggregating, but we have very products that are extremely important, fantasy. We're one of the top two platforms in the original in fantasy and sports. And we have all these new fantasy games that we've been launching. And of course, in finance, we are the still the number one for tracking your portfolio and getting research and information about it. And so all of our, whether it's Brian Sazi and his team on finance or it's KOC and that stuff on sports, we're providing context to the actions that you're going to be taking, right? in those verticals.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is what we really wanted to get out of. And, you know, if you think about TechCrunch, it was like, you know, it said right there in the handle on Twitter, it was like, send us scoops, you know, and they were breaking news, sometimes about us. And, you know, which is fair. But I remember they were doing that in Tim Armstrong's days as well. And that's great. But it's just not the kind of content we're producing. Shams and sports and woge before him in the NBA. They started at Yahoo during that time period. And we just thought, look, it's that news is going to break and very quickly it's going to be disseminated and you won't usually get credit for it on ESPN. They won't always say where, you know, it's sports center, like where that news was broken. And then, of course, then they wind up stealing those guys and paying them $10 million a year. So it's just like a game that we decided, like, that's not what people are really coming to us for. It's really more to be the aggregator.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two answers. So, one, I'll come back to it, is I think that the content you're creating and the cost structure of that has to be congruent with the kind of advertising you're pulling in. So if it's all programmatic, you can't staff premium or produce premium. And I do think businesses along the way have gotten on the wrong side on their P&L because of that. Staff premium and monetized at very low CPM. I think it's wrong to say that we're not in content because it's just the kind of content we're creating. So our three pillars for product are superior aggregation, proprietary data sets, and what we kind of call anchors for context. So that really is content for context. So we're doing a lot of content in sports. We're doing 60 hours a week now of original video. Same thing in fining.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just bring this back to Engadget and TechCrunch for one more turn, and then I want to talk about how you've structured Yahoo, and in particular what you're doing in the advertising side, because I'm very curious there. Do you think as you exit the space where you run newsrooms and editorial teams, that those cost structures are long for this world? It can't just be Yahoo syndication deals that support all the newsrooms of the world. There has to be some set of other monetizations, some set of other revenues, some diversification. You were operating these businesses, you chose to be out of it. Is it just because you didn't see the business opportunity for them, or is it you just didn't want to attack those problems?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A tweet, an Instagram post, a YouTube video in the hopes that you'll either aggregate audience there and or they'll start to build brand to bring it back to your own property. In our case, it's, you know, you're consuming some of that content with your brand there, as you know from the fish days. And then it leads you downstream. So it's just a different model. And in our model, it is much more the content of the publisher versus you creating a product for me, which is really what everyone's doing, you know, everywhere else.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in our case, they're Rev shares. So we're not, you know, writing a check to own the content. It really is our social contract. And remember, search also had a social contract, which is you let us crawl you and then we'll have a snippet and then we'll send you traffic and in search that is what we're trying to get back to and get the industry back to. For the rest of Yahoo, I'd say the difference is that in every product you just named, publishers are creating bespoke content that is for that platform”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you just look at it and squint, and they're like, we should pay nothing because the users will make the videos for free. There's an army of teenagers who will show up here no matter what we do. And you're saying, no, we should pay some money for content from some of these newsrooms because there's some user demand. How does that margin work out for you? Where is everybody making money here?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I'm pushing on this so hard is one, I think it's refreshing to hear an aggregator talk about supply in this way. It doesn't happen very often. All of your biggest competitors One, they've all pivoted to video in whatever way they've pivoted to video. But if you kind of look at the biggest aggregators, and they look like social platforms for the most part, they pay nothing for their content, right? Instagram pays nothing to Instagram influencers. It's all brand deals up and down. X has whatever revenue sharing, X is doing, but it's so odd and it incentivizes such weird things that I don't think it counts for publishers. YouTube rates are falling. If you ask people who make YouTube shorts, they're not making enough money on YouTube. The dynamics of Google, Google never paid for the content. The original sin of the publishing business was Jonah Predi's belief that he could go so viral with BuzzFeed that Facebook would be forced to pay him money in some sort of like cable carriage deal situation that never came to pass. All of these publishers have hit the rocks in some way. They've all landed on the users will make us the stuff for free, right? If you just kind of like broadly look at that and squint they're all these companies are differently positioned. You compete in different ways.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The content that went in the original large language models, they did not ask permission, even today. I mean, everybody still needs Google to get out there. And so you can send you can ask people to stop crawling you. You can send a cease and desist, but it's very hard to prevent it, but that original version of each large language model, it was just taken. And yeah, I think that was wrong”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have identified that we think people want more utility in our homepage. They can go downstream to news or to sports or finance, but in that place. And so it is more of an aggregator. That is also one reason why you will see short form video, because that's actually a valid way to consume news and information. But, you know, we think that aggregation is something people really want from us. And to do that well, we're not going to be the ones creating all the content ourselves. And so to do that, we have to partner with publishers and send them traffic. And I do think personally that”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would almost be like if Google today on every search results page linked to ChatGPT with a logo for ChatGPT and paid ChatGPT for the privilege, that's what Yahoo gave to Google in June of 2000. But from that point forward, it was a struggling company against the trends at Google and then Facebook and then as a struggling public company, it was just hard to make the right choices. During that time, it drifted from the portal experience, which I think a lot of people really valued, just probably not as many as valued Google. And so there was a lot of fog of war there. But by the time we picked it up, it was really this news feed.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Yahoo homepage that we inherited in 2021 had over the years drifted towards being a more kind of clickbait news feed and away from being a portal. And I have a lot of empathy for how that happened. We could dig all the way into the history of the company. It goes all the way back to the original sin of giving search to Google, which is what happened. It was a misnomer that it was beaten by Google. Yahoo didn't even do search. They did an enterprise deal.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it can be all of the above in this case. So I do get the question, and we could be just being Pollyanna about it or think it's a differentiator or whatever, but we actually think being able to check the sources. First of all, we think people want to go downstream to the publishers. Second, we think actually being able to check the sources or follow up to go get more information is an extremely high user need. So I actually think it's core to the user need in search, which is really where we are playing. We're not a large language model. We're not going to be the place you come to code. We're really an answer engine is how we've launched Scout. Part of that is the traditional role of a search engine. It's also how we're launching is integrated into our search engine experience. So it is more similar to that from the get-go. But it is also core value of our products for sure. I mean, we've had to do a lot of rethinking.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You haven't quite done that. You know, bits and bobs of it on Yahoo properties, but you haven't fully taken, okay, we're going to wall this garden off. We'll buy the content, we'll put it here. It's all one experience, and then we can change it however we want. You seem committed to sending traffic downstream. Where does that come from? Is that just a personally held belief? Is that idealistic? Or is there a business reason for that as well?”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's my other question here. I know you've done a lot on the advertising side of the business. You've sold off some pieces. You've rethought some other pieces. I want to come to that. But let me just ask about that dynamic of sending traffic downstream. That's not what any of your competitors are doing. They're holding more and more traffic within their walled gardens. They're creating more and more formats. They're all converging on being scrolling video. You can just see it, right? Everything turns into...”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they wound up there. I think not by accident, but if you think about they were built by researchers, you know, and so of course the first user interface had a bunch of citations. It looked like somebody, you know, at university had written a research paper. And I think we backed into that by accident, that being the interface for what this should look like. That's not how it has to look and operate in order to give great answers. I think we can do more to send traffic downstream. And we've tried to do that. And I think it's still early. And so maybe that'll wind up in more of the products. It certainly needs to for advertising to work.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can see Google is walking a complicated line now with their publisher relationships, with how many links are in their results, how they integrate advertising. On the same token, you can see ChatGPT and OpenAIR walking in complicated line as well, right? Like they haven't quite figured out their advertising experience.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we do explicitly link a lot to publishers, and we're hoping that not just for us, but for other engines in the future, that that becomes more of the user interface for these things. Those publishers deserve it, and we're not going to have the content to consume to give great answers if publishers aren't healthy. I really actually think Google would have wound up with that interface, one much more similar to what we did if they'd been first out of the gate. I think once ChatGPT beat them to market, however that happened, they kind of had to play catch up at that point to avoid people bleeding out over to ChatGPT. I empathize with why they did it, but I actually don't, I'm hoping that's not where the industry winds up.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have some history in search and have seen this happen before with some things that my team built. I'm okay if the industry copies some of the things that we just did with Yahoo Scout, where we have very purposefully highlighted and linked very explicitly and bent over backwards to try to send more traffic downstream to the people who created the content that was digested by the LLMs to create the answers that they've been giving with chatbots. Ours looks a lot more like traditional search. It is more paragraph driven. It's not a chatbot that's trying to act like it's a person and be your friend. And I actually thought that Claude ad besides the issue of ads, which we can also talk about, you know, even for Claude, I mean, kind of that creepy, you know, interface with the chatbot, we don't do that.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yahoo has clearly gotten something out of being the aggregator over the years, so I'm not saying it's completely selfless, but it's going all the way back to the beginning. Yahoo's role was to help people find websites, right? And then apps and then stories over the years. But we have taken that really seriously here that we, you know, it's our job to help send traffic downstream, help you build that brand. We're in the same spot. I mean, we have SEO and we, you know, we definitely are, you know, in the same position. And then thankfully, over 70% of our visits are direct. We've built that side of the business. So I understand what you're saying. And I do think it's under threat. I think that the LLMs are one big reason that they're under threat. And AI mode in Google being the biggest challenge. And look, it's probably pie in the sky, but I.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tech media is in decline. Media is in decline, newspapers are getting shut down. And I'm wondering if that position as an aggregator, you think about that dynamic, right? If we're not sustainable, we will not actually have enough stuff to aggregate.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build something that's sustainable in its own terms and collect all the algorithmic traffic along the way. And I think I'm still my worldview that we can chase SEO, but SEO is going away for people. We could chase whatever Instagram trend and switch from stories to reels back to the carousel, whatever at Missary wants us to, but that's unsustainable. And I'm asking this question about aggregators and selling the newsrooms to you because Yahoo is an aggregator of audience can be sustainable for those newsrooms. Because the thing that I'm seeing is Google is a source of traffic is going away. Twitter or X doesn't send links to anyone anymore as a source of traffic that's going away. The referral to the newsrooms is in decline. And then you just look at the state of the universe.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From there. Is well before your time when we started the version 2011, our first big syndication deal was with Yahoo in our first major traffic fire hose was the Yahoo.com homepage. And I would sit around trying to figure out what stories would get placed there. And I had all these conversations. And basically the answer is you're never going to know. So then we did all this data analysis and we found out that the Yahoo algorithm loves stories about fish. I'm not kidding. It was literally fish. I believe we would on Fridays, because I'm from Wisconsin, we would have fish Fridays at the Verge and we would literally search for fish technology stories and collect all this Yahoo traffic. And this probably has more impact on my thinking about how to run a media property even now in 2026. Like you shouldn't do that. Right. Like, yeah, the Verge is shockingly about fish under it all. It's really just about fish. No, it was, if I played this algorithm, eventually it will go away. Like this cannot be sustainable. And so we have to.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did the opposite. We actually just put the Yahoo logo on the artifact app and started from there and just admitted it. So yeah, I think, look, that is still one of the things that Yahoo does best is we are very large. We have a massive audience and we can turn that fire hose on great products if we build them. That's part of our thesis for how we would grow this business, which admittedly is a big turn, has been a big turnaround.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, or core value of that product is publishers in the open web and doing right by them. But I actually think that their biggest issue with Artifact was running into the challenge a lot of people have, which is audience. It's really hard, especially in news, to build an audience of scale in 2024 when we bought Artifact or today. And so it was a very small user base for a very awesome product. In fact, 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. I was personally, you know, usually when you make an acquisition like that, you kind of munch them into the Borg, to the mothership.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“News on the web is a declining thing in 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, right? I've heard you say that before. It's what you're saying now. Like the value here is bringing everything together and providing audience. Are you running out of web to aggregate? Because this is, to me, the defining problem of our moment right now.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or enterprising that news, right, versus being the aggregator for other people who are doing it. So that's the other piece that I'm really curious about. Yahoo bought Artifact, which is a really great AI-powered news app that was started by the founders of Instagram. I've talked to Mike Krieger and Kevin Sistram about that over the years.”
2026-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web's homepage · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT