Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving the web’s homepage

Today, I’m talking with Jim Lanzone, who is the CEO of Yahoo. It’s basically impossible to sum up the Yahoo story, but the short version of it is that a long time ago Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and basically everything has gone sideways since. You’ll hear Jim refer to that deal as Yahoo’s original sin, actually. After a long series of mergers and spinouts and an extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company. And it has big properties in sports and finance, and, against all odds, email, where it’s growing with young people. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail, people. You heard it here first. All of that means Yahoo is profitable and growing, according to Jim, but I still had some big questions about where that growth is going. Yahoo is still the third-place search engine and it just launched a new AI-powered search called Scout, but are they really trying to take market share from Google? Is the big investment in traditional advertising a good bet when creators and influencers are taking up so much attention? And with so much of both sports and finance turning into straight-up gambling, does Jim have any red lines he won’t cross with two of the biggest apps on the internet? Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. There’s a lot in this one, including some wild Decoder org chart terminology and what amounts to two people with a long history on the internet trying to come up with ever deeper references to old memes. It’s a ride, and Jim was pretty much game.  Jim was also a huge nerd about ad tech, and we used a lot of vocabulary talking about his decision to shut down part of Yahoo’s ad business and invest in the part that’s growing. Here’s a quick rundown — feel free to come back to this if it’s too wonky, I promise you’ll get it, it’s not that hard. A supply-side platfor...

Fonte: The Verge
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