Public company aspirations

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Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Jim Lansone, the CEO of Yahoo. You've heard of Yahoo, you've probably used Yahoo Sports, or Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Mail. It's basically impossible to sum up the long, complicated, chaotic 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 murders and spinouts and a brief, extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent privately held company. And it still has those big properties in sports and finance and email, where against all odds, it's growing with young people. You heard it here first. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail. All of that means that Yahoo is once again 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. Is Jim really trying to take market share from Google? Is the big bet on traditional advertising that he's making a good one 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. There's a lot going on 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 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 in order to invest in the part that's growing. So here's a quick rundown of all that vocab. Feel free to come back to this if it gets too wonky. I promise you'll get it. It's not that hard, it's just a lot of acronyms. So you'll hear Jim say that he shut down Yahoo's SSP. That's a supply side platform. It's the tech that an app, a site, or a platform You've got inventory on your website, supply, and advertisers use the SSP to buy that inventory. Yahoo had a big SSP and Jim shut it down in favor of investing in the demand side platform, or DSP, which works the other way around. An advertiser says it wants to reach a certain number of people, and then the DSP, the demand side platform, does automated auctions across a number of sites and apps to display those ads. This is the big money. It's how Google makes so much of its money, for example. The thing about a big DSP or demand-side platform is that it doesn't just deliver ads on the web or in apps. You'll hear Jim talk a lot about CTV, which stands for connected TV. All those ads and streaming apps, they're delivered by big DSPs, big demand-side platforms, including Yahoo's, which works with Netflix and Spotify. Like I said, this is a lot of acronyms in vocab, but just think about it for a minute, re-listen if you need to, and I promise you'll get it. Speaking of ads, one last thing, a reminder that you can listen to this episode or any episode of Decoder without ads by subscribing to The Verge. Just go to the Verge.com slash subscribe for details. Okay, Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. Here we go. Jim Lenzone, you're the CEO of Yahoo. Welcome to Decoder. Great to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. Uh my personal story is is wrapped up in the thing that is now Yahoo that you operate. I once worked for AOL, which got smashed into Yahoo and a series of acquisitions. I know you are uh thinking a lot about what Yahoo is today and the future of the web and its relationship to the the larger networks that we all operate on. So I think there's a lot to unpack there. I do want to start with my personal history with Yahoo, because I got my start in tech journalism at NGadget at twelve dollars a post when I was owned by AOL. This is a a very odd time in media that Really it was the last non-Yahoo brand to be sold. You know, we we've been in the process since we were um spun out of Verizon in September of 2021 of you know really rationalizing the the portfolio and and what makes sense going forward. Um, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but that goes all the way back to, you know, why are we still here after all these years? What's our right to exist? What's our right to win? And really the long story short of that is it it went back to the original mission of the company, being the trusted guide to the internet in 1995 that meant helping you find websites in 2026, it it can mean all kinds of different things. But that's where we're strong. That's where we are still strong after all the things the company went through over the years. You know, when we got here, uh there were still just a lot of things going on. We had a content delivery network business. Um we'd you know the company had, you know, I think drifted very far into all kinds of media and away from its history as as more of an aggregator and and way you know place to help you find where to go for that media. But between you know, TechCrunch, Riv,als which we sold and gadget, um and you know, a lot of other small properties. Uh ultimately also AOL, uh, we sold, you know, back in Q4. Um so, you know, on the one hand it's about focus and on the other hand when it comes to properties like TechCrunch and Gadget um you know really if you think about what we do while we do media it's really to provide context for the products that we're operating in those categories. We're not the place to go for breaking news. We're not the place to do that. And that that's why, you know, in gadget and tech crunch found homes with in both cases families of brands that were uh you know either tech focused or media focused and really do that kind of journalism, which is is really not what what Yahoo does. Aaron Powell I want to dig into that just one turn. I I think we're not the place for breaking news that has a different valence when you talk about that in in the context of sports approaches. Proingduc that new or cre or or enterprising that news, right? Versus being the aggregator for other people who are doing it. Aaron Powell So that's the other piece that I'm really curious about. Yahoo bought Artifact, which was a really great AI-powered news app that was uh started by the founders of Instagram. I've talked to Mike Krieger and Kevin Sistrim about that over the years. You know, one of the reasons I got out of that business and and sold it to Yahoo was they were like there isn't enough web to aggregate anymore. Right? Like news on the web is a declining thing and 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 I've heard you say that before, is 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 the defining problem of our moment right now. We're particularly passionate about that. And I'm sure we'll talk about our AI search engine that we launched, but that's that's a big part of the thesis behind that as well. Or core value of that product is is publishers in the open web and and doing right by them. Um but I you know I actually think that their biggest issue with artifact is was running into the 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 or today. Um, and so it was a very small user base for a very awesome product. So I in fact, artifact was our admission that our you know what what we inherited was probably the the 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 uh, you know, you you kind of munge them into the the the Borg into the mothership. We did the opposite. We actually just put the Yahoo logo on the artifact app and started from there and just admit, you know, admitted it. So yeah, I think look, yeah, that is still one of the things that Yahoo does best is we we are very large, we have a massive audience and we can, you know turn that fire hose on great products if we build them. That's part of our thesis for how we would grow grow this business, which admittedly is, you know, is a is a big turn, you know, has been a big turnaround. This is well before your time. When we started the Verge in twenty eleven, our first big syndication deal was with Yahoo, and 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 gonna 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, believe it. And 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, it's the verge is shockingly about fish. Under under it all, it's really just about fish. No, it was um if I play to this algorithm, eventually it will go away. Like this cannot be sustainable. And so we have to build something that's sustainable in its own terms and collect all the algorithmic traffic along the way. And I I think I'm I'm still right, I that's 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 Adam and Sari wants us to, but that's unsustainable. And I'm asking this question on aggregators and selling the newsrooms to you because I'm wondering if Yahoo as an aggregator of audience can be sustainable for those newsrooms. Because the thing that I'm seeing is Google as a of source traffic is going away. Twitter or X doesn't send links to anyone anymore as a source of traffic it's going away. The referral to the newsrooms is in decline. And then you just look at the state of the universe, the tech media is in decline. Media is in decline. Newspapers are getting shut down. And I'm wondering if that position is an aggregator, you think about that dynamic, right? We if we if we're not sustainable, we will not actually have enough stuff to aggregate. Look, Yahoo has clearly gotten something out of being the aggregator over over the years. So I'm not saying it's um completely selfless, but you know, it's 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 we have taken that really seriously here that that we um you know it's our job to help send traffic downstream, um, help you build that brand. We're in the same spot. I mean, we we have SEO and we, you know, we we definitely are uh you know in the same position. Um and then thankfully, over seventy per ofcent our visits are direct. Um we've built that side of the of the business. So I I understand what you're saying, and I do think it's under threat. Uh I think that the LLMs are one big reason that they're under threat, and AI mode and Google being the biggest challenge. And look, it's probably pie in the sky, but I I 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 uh 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 uh you know to create the answers that they've been giving with chatbots. Um ours looks a lot more like traditional search and um it it is more paragraph driven. It's not a uh chatbot that's trying to you know act like it's a 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 that creepy uh you know interface with with the chatbot, we don't do that. 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 the user interface for these things. Those publishers deserve it. And we're not gonna have the content uh to consume to give great answers if 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, uh however that happened, uh, they kind of had to play catch up at that point, you know, to avoid you know, people bleeding out over to ChatGPT. So I I empathize with why they did it, but I actually don't I'm hoping that's not where the industry winds up. Aaron Powell 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. Uh uh on the same token you can see ChatGPT and OpenAI are walking a complicated line as well, right? Like they ha they haven't quite figured out their advertising experience. But they but they wound up there I 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 had uh written a research paper. And I think they we backed into that by accident, that being the interface for what this should look like. But that's not how it has to look and how and operate in order to give great answers. Um I think we can do more to send traffic downstream and we've tried to do that and I 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 to work. Yeah. I I th I think that's my other question here. I I I ri I know you've done a lot on the advertising side of the business. You sold off some pieces, you've rethought some other pieces. I wanna come to that. But let me just ask about that dynamic, right, 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? There's every everything turns into a crab in the end, right? With conversion evolution. You haven't quite done that. There's you know bits and bobs of it on Yahoo properties, but you haven't fully taken the okay, we're gonna wall this garden off, we'll buy the content, we'll put it here, it's all one, 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? Aaron Powell 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 to check the sources. First of all, we think people want to go downstream to the uh to the publishers. Second, we think actually being able to check the sources um or follow up to go f get more information is a extremely high user need. So I actually think it's it's core to um to the to the user need in search, which is really where we are playing. You know, we're not we're not a large language model. We're not gonna be the place you come to code. You know, we're not we're we're really an answer engine is how we've we've launched Scout. Part of that is 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 a core value of our products for sure. I mean, um, we've had to do a lot of rethinking. I mean, the the Yahoo homepage that we inherited in 2021 had over the years drifted towards being a more kind of uh clickbait you know newsfeed and away from being a portal. And I have I have a lot of empathy for for how that happened. We could dig all the way into the history of the company. I think it yeah 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. 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, you know, company against the trends at Google and then Facebook and then as a struggling public company, uh you know, it was just hard to make the right choices. But 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, you know, this news feed. And we've we have, you know, 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. a valid way to consume news and information. But you know, we think that aggregation is a is is something people really want from us. And to do that well, we're we're not going to be the ones creating all the content ourselves. And and so to do that we have to partner with publishers and send them traffic and i do think personally that you know the content that went in the original large language models they did not ask permission. Even today, me Ian you, know, everybody still needs Google to get out there. And so you can send, you can, you can ask people to stop crawling you. You can, you know, you can send a cease and desist, but it's like very hard to prevent it. But that original version of each large language model, it it was just taken. And yeah, I I think that was wrong. The reason I'm pushing on this so hard uh is one, I think it's refreshing to to hear an aggregator talk about supply in this way. Like it it doesn't happen very often. All of your biggest competit ors one, they've all pivoted to video in whatever way they've pivoted to video. But if you kinda look at the biggest aggregators, and they look like social platforms for the most part. pa Theyy nothing for their content. Instagram pays nothing to Instagram influencers. It's all brand deals up and down. Uh X has whatever revenue sharing X is doing, but it's uh i 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 uh Jonah Pretti'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, and they're all all these companies are are differently positioned, you compete in different ways, 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? Right. Where where is everybody making money here? Well they're in our case they're rev shares. So we're not um you know right writing a a check to own the content. We it's it really is our our um our social contract and remember search also 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 congru that is, you know, uh for that platform. A tweet, an Instagram post, a YouTube video, in the hopes that you'll either aggregate audience there, uh, and then and or you know, they'll start to build brand to to bring it back to your own property. In our case, um it's you know you're consuming some of that content, you know, with your brand there, as you know from the fish days. Uh um and then it leads you downstream. So it's just a different model, and 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. Let me just bring this back to Engagent 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 on 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? Right? It can't just be Yahoo syndication deals that support all the newsrooms of of the world. Right? There has to be some set of other monetization, some set of other revenue, 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? Aaron Powell 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 uh on the wrong side on their P and L because of because of that. They've they staff premium and I think it it's 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 um you know are to our superior aggregation, uh, 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 finance is we've been building that muscle. Um we have the number one NBA podcast with Kevin O'Connor. We have the number one MMA podcast with Ariel Hawani. We do a lot of content, um, but it is not breaking news content. When I got here, we had a White House correspondent, we were sending, we were kind of competing with the Associated Press. And that's 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 on Twitter, it was like, send us scoops, you know, and and they were breaking news, sometimes about us. And it, you know, which is fair. But um, you know, I remember they were doing that with in Tim Armstrong's days as well. And uh and that's great, but it's it's just not the kind of content we're producing. You know, Shams and Sports and and Woj before him and the NBA, like they started at Yahoo um, you know, during that time period. And we and we just thought, look, it's it's that news is gonna break and very quickly it's gonna 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 where that news was broken. And then of course then they wind up stealing those those guys and paying them $10 million a year. So it's just like a game that we decided. Like we that's not what people are really coming to us for. It's it's really more to be the aggregator and then we can provide great context. In sports and finance, it's also a little bit different in that not only are we aggregating, but we have very we we have products that are extremely important. Fantasy, uh you know, we're one of the top two platforms in the original and in fantasy and sports. And we have all these new fan fantasy games that we've been launching. And of course in in finance, you know, we are the still the number one for track, you know, tracking your portfolio and getting research and information about it. And so all of our, whether it's Brian Sazi and his team, you know, on finance or or it's KOC and and that stuff on sports, we're providing context to the actions that you're going to be taking, right, in in those uh in those vertic als . We have to take a quick break here. We'll be right back . Support for this show comes from LinkedIn . For small businesses, every hire matters, but the time and resources required to hire right are limited. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by servicing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. 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ShipStation is an all-in-one platform that brings together order management, rate shopping, and powerful analytics in a single dashboard that helps you find competitive shipping rates and can even honor discounts you already have with other carriers. ShipStation says that by sharing tracking details, you can cut customer service inquiries by 12%. You could try ShipStation free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Just go to shipstation.com and use code decoder for 60 days for free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's shipstation.com code decod er Welcome back. I'm talking with Jim Lanzone about the winding road that ended up with him being the CEO of Ya hoo. This is a great spot uh for the decoder questions. I actually want to ask you this. You you've been CEO for a minute now. Yahoo has been through all kinds of twists and turns. At one point it was squished into something with AOL at Verizon called Oath, which was deeply confusing. Uh you are became CEO after Apollo Global bought the company. It's a private equity firm. Very few people are ever going to think them toselves I should be the CEO of Yahoo and then interview for that job. Walk me through that. What what was the pitch? What did you make a deck? How did it work? They bought it in May of 21. It closed in September of 21. And you know, they talked to a lot of different people around the industry, people that you know, that I know, uh, about, you know, doing diligence on Yahoo and whether they should buy it. You know, I competed against Yahoo for at basically every stop of my career. I knew every executive team. I, you know, went head to head with them over the years. I I always thought I'd partner with them on certain things over the years. I always thought it was, you know, the granddaddy of all turnarounds. And I I've been part of a few of them. Uh you know, I've just grown to to love doing them. I and and in in my case I I wanted to run towards the fire. I was very much you know 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, uh the conversation immediately turned to whether I would be interested in running it. And I definitely was. So there was no there was no pitch deck other than my advice and and input along the way to buying it. And uh and then over that summer before they closed, it wound up being a negotiation of me coming on to run it. And um, you know, I I I'd been at other companies where we had we'd thought to ourselves, like, oh, I wish we could take our executive team over there and compete with them with those assets. Let's see how that Olympic race goes. Like we we wanted to try that. And uh and so you know, look, it's it was you know, almost 30 years in the making. I was getting it at a very different time than if I'd gotten it in twenty ten or two thousand five or or some other time. But the assets were still extremely strong and uh and and yeah, I I do I do also understand the part of your question, which is PE and and you know, do people in my position normally want to go do that? I've I've s you know, I've been an entrepreneur, I've started two companies, I've I've worked for media moguls, I've done all kinds of things, and my my view on that is just you always gotta serve somebody and it's your board, it's it's the public markets, it's a really hard boss, you know, whoever it is. And and I I felt like Reed Raymond, who was the partner at 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 or VC or anybody else. Aaron Ross Powell no actually let me ask you about the the sort of PE piece of it because you you're right that I'm very curious about that. Usually a PE firm buys a declining asset to just ride it on the way down. Everything you've talked about so far is growth. Right? Have they provided the sufficient capital to like reinvest in the business, or are you just moving money around through cuts and reallocations? Aaron Powell Two things. One is that they they actually have been. In fact I was in a meeting this morning where they were offering capital to do to do big things that we we were talking about. Does the ominous music play when the private equity firm offers you money. No, we have a deal team that that's not like that at all. Um and I don't know about it. Um no they they've really always wanted to kind of swing you know bigger. And and I'd say in in the early days, uh, 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 you know 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 you know, a, much bigger outcome uh along the way. Um, we have tended to make our own fuel. I promise you, there's not been one um reduction here that hasn't been strategically uh decided by my team, you know, we shut down two really big uh money losing ad tech parts of the company. That was all our team, you know, trying to to do that. So we we are, you know, I'd say profitable to very profitable. Um and we don't need to make a dollar more than our budget to satisfy the the PE gods. Um it's it's agreed upon every year in our planning process, you know, what that's gonna be. And certainly when we made the changes to the revenue engine, it was a little dicey there for a year. That was the you know, the Indiana Jones like replaced the gold situation. You know, they had to take a leap of faith with us on that. But um but yeah, we we've not been through any uh PE driven uh cost reduction exercises or anything yet. I've seen a quote from Apollo saying Yahoo is the fastest return on investment that they've ever had. I know your private company are uh what is that return? Is it healthily profitable? Is it just a dollar more than they sp ent? No. Very profitable. And we know we d look, we don't disclose revenue, um, but it's in the billions. Um 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 was a lot of revenue and and profit. And that that went out. But um but no it is it is in the billions of revenue. It is very profitable. It's not profitable by a dollar. I'll say for a company that really paid the price for being a struggling public company for a long time, right into the teeth of some big competitors coming along to eat its lunch, uh it's it's been good to be private along the way, whether we're owned by PE or not, you know, to be able to make a lot of these changes. But yeah, but it it's it's in a very healthy spot financially. It does not sound like you ever sat down and opened up Google Docs and said, if I ran Yahoo and made a bullet list, um, but you've made a lot of decisions, including the decisions to uh exit some businesses. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? Having watched your podcast for a long time, I know I knew that question was coming. And I I just didn't want to come up with some bullshit answer. The answer is honestly, ' Icause'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 gonna try and do that. I I I think if you've done this a long time, and I look I'm the wrong CEO for enterprise software company, I'm the wrong CEO for a food or sh company, but I've done consumer internet my entire career. Um I've started them, I've taken over big ones, I've I've seen kind of everything you could see in this industry. And um it's very easy to make decisions. It's I think it's harder to get the information uh for it. I think my team would tell you that, you know, I'm very quick to make decisions. I would rather they, you know, uh have done it themselves and we can talk about the org structure and why that is when it you know I'm kind of the editor in chief myself for for what happens here. The framework is definitely through the lens of our our mission. Um you know I don't have a set of like Enron values on their 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 you know 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. Like you you could say you could dress that up any way you want. That is my job. I think that's a job of any CEO, even if you're a series A you know uh company. And so that lens for what we're trying to do um 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 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. It was it was uh not only getting us through COVID and and all of that and extracted from Verizon. We actually had to stand this company back up. We're 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 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. Yeah. And now we're in, I'd say the third phase, which is starting to take shots on go al. Um, and so the decisions are always gonna be different, you know, as as I think you go through those those phases. This is the other question. You're you you you've talked a lot about restructuring a company, getting rid of pieces you didn't need anymore. Uh how is Yahoo structured today and how did you land at the decisions that brought you to that So it is a c conglomerate or portfolio structure. I backed into accidentally this structure years ago at another company. This is actually the fourth conglomerate I've been a part of, starting with IEC, which bought Ask Jeeves back in the day. You have a thick skin, my friend. Yeah. Um, and uh 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 and they went through a period of trying to turn it with Jack Welch as the advisor, turn it into an operation an operating company with a um a common you know back end. And that just didn't work because ticket master had nothing to do with ask and search had nothing to do with um you know lending tree or or the you know 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 uh leader or uh 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 sports line and okay, I get to run that now. And within like a 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 uh groups that were similar, um, with general managers in charge of each business. That structure worked great. And we call we we came to call that federal and state. Yep. 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 at the federal level, you know, there's no reason to have two IRSs or two FEMAs, you know, we could across finance and legal and HR and so and some other things we'd like to do. Can I can I just tell you, you're killing me. Do you know what Tim Armstrong's re-org at AOL was that basically inspired us to all leave and start the verge? It was uh cities, towns. And uh he put up a big sign over in gadget that said tech town. And I was like, I gotta I gotta get out. I can't be living in Tech Town, dude. Like I gotta I gotta bail. But I understand the metaphor. Well it's funny too, because you you say all that. And that 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 hired 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 you know, who roll up to a central person. Um, and so that that model worked amazingly well because you can get real efficiencies at the center and expertise at the center. While you know, again, I think I don't think efficiency is the name of the game here. It's it's excellence, you know, and and growth. And so you you hire great people to do those things. And then I'm, you know, I'm I'm the editor-in-chief at the center of of all those. And we do have patriotism, you know, across all the brands. It's a lot easier at Yahoo where we have one central brand. Um, 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 borg, or you could be the GM model that we run. It always comes down to the people. And it I I honestly think that it where where you see problems, it's not just the structure. It's not just the culture uh that you inherited. It's uh it really is the people. And what they're good at, if if you don't hire real domain experts who have high EQ are really good teammates to each other. And uh, you know, you just you're gonna wind up with a cesspool anyway, or people who don't know which way to run. And I think our people are just awesome. And I think that was true with 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, we're who would have thought Yahoo's gonna launch an AI surgeon? And uh and you know, uh we have some other bets that we're making. So um I do think the people are what it really comes down to at the end of the day. I know you have three divisions. Uh it's new sports and finance. Tell me about how they operate together. Right? Is it ever all three of those get to do whatever they want? And at the top you're saying, actually we need an AI search engine that goes across these things. Or do they have harmonized product roadmaps? How does that work? Well, believe it or not th,ose are not the divisions. So um those those are also divisions. So we have GMs on each of those. Some roll up to uh Matt Sanchez, our COO. So he has the home business, uh, the search business, email, which is in many ways our most important historical business, and our DSP, um as well as monetization that goes across that, you know, loads up to Matt. Ryan Spoon runs what we call the Yahoo Media Group. Um and that has uh today sports finance and an I've talked publicly that there's a third leg of the stool which is we we definitely you know probably have a right to go deeper into video um in a nonfiction way across the verticals where we're strong. News today rolls into the home business just because they're they were so intertwined, but theoretically that could it could be one or the other. And then again, every one of those businesses has a GM who really has the business plan, the PL, the resources to run their business. Um, and then sidebar to that will have a you know CFO or the chief revenue officer with the sales team, et cetera. So that is how it's structured. W if you were to talk internally, there actually is incredible harmony across those businesses. Yeah, they they brawl sometimes over traffic from the home page or something to do with the content management system or the monetization, you know, uh but for the most part, I actually think you you'd get pretty unanimous uh, you know, uh feelings about how we operate together. I think they would all sing from the same playbook. You know, when people interview with us, they always comment about how everyone is is kind of speaking off the same playbook. So yeah, I mean I think we actually do have a pretty good working uh structure toget Aaron Powell Talk to me about the the monetization piece. And I I want to get into you invested in your demand side platform for ads. If I'm looking at news and sports, I would say, well, we're just gonna do gambling now. Like that's the money. Like it's it's Yeah. Like this is why when I say um finance and sports are colliding, right, the the feeling that we're all just gambling seems to be infecting everything over there. You have a deal of polymarket and others. But then you have this big investment in just what feels like traditional display advertising, which is not an investment that other people are making at scale. Why are you still so invested there? Is that growing? Are you just holding serve? And then how do you think about , well, we should just do casino. 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, we had you know it was the Yahoo SSP. We couldn't go out and play the field on an auction from Trade Desk and from Google and and from others. So that was part of the decision there. As 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. Um and so we did in one day we did this this huge that included an extension of our Microsoft partnership on search advertising, which is another way we make money. Um we announced we we did all these things. So we extended Microsoft, we shut down the native business and we uh we took 25% of Tabula and we outsourced it to them. Um 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. And we wanted to be able to play the field on yield on 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. Um and uh and we and 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 dude due to this the direct relationship. 75% of our data DAUs are logged in. And so we really do know our users. You cluster that information and you you either target on Yahoo proper or you take it to go, you know, across uh when you buy through the DSP. And we just can we are incredible at conversion and outcomes. Um and that really is one of the you know, why I think Yahoo is still an a a very underappreciated asset uh you know would be for anybody. We we win nine out of ten head to head uh you know tests against people uh on the DSP side. And, you know, 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. BetMGM has historically been the uh you know the gambling um partner for the last seven years it was a deal Verizon did um 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 we didn't have that deal. Um so we'll see like what the partnerships 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 downfunnel into search. Yeah. Which you know we can we should talk about search separately. But yeah. I just want to unpack the demand side piece of the puzzle. This is where advertisers log in to buy ads, and then you can go address a bunch of stuff, whether that's display advertising on Yahoo, and then you're saying you can even get to Netflix. I think you have a deal with Netflix to help them sell their inventory because they stood up that business so fast. I'm legitimately curious about the formats you see growing there, right? Is it display at like everywhere else does like banners and boxes are in decline and all of the money is moving to influencer brand deals. I get consumer tech companies on the show all the time. The CEO of Shark Ninja was on the show and he's like, I built my business with influencers. And we had this like massive data set of sentiment analysis from the influencers we work with to figure out what blender we should make next. And that is a crazy business that only exists because of influencer marketing. That feels, you know, if if you you listen to the show, you think that's the future and here you are saying the oil underneath Yahoo uh was this data set that lets us target across to other platforms. But is it targeting on Yahoo that's as valuable as being able to sell CTV on Netflix. Because that feels like the risk in this whole approach. Aaron Powell Yeah. I 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 to for an outcome. DSP buyers are typically outcome driven. Definitely Yahoo proper buyers are are largely outcome driven. We will get, you know, big brand takeovers, you know, we just sold one yesterday for the World Cup. Um, you know, we've been building deeply into to soccer, into motorsports, um and some other verticals there. But um, but for the most part, it is 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. But um a person used to work for me run SurveyMonkey and they were buying through the DS R Dsp. And he came to me and said, You know, you got Yahoo Proper is by far the best performing part of this. Can we just buy directly from you? And so I introduced him over and they did a deal, you know, to buy direct through Yahoo. So it's it's it's a different ad format for sure. Um but e you know, and and again, even native advertising can perform. It's gonna perform at a at a different percentage. But the internet is just a much broader and more vast place than people appreciate. Um you know, we 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 percent of Yahoo Mail users are Gen Z or millennial. Nobody, nobody would assume that. And it's growing has had one of its best years ever. But the uh you know the size and scale of is just very rare. And so and but but of course the surface area for that is is mostly not gonna be premium video advertising. It's gonna be display. Um and that has its place in the ecosystem. You know, it's not the hottest thing right now, but it it converts and it has a place. I'm asking these questions because it's just refreshing to hear people say the basics still have something to say for them. Yep. They do. Now we gotta get search there, dude. We gotta we gotta search has to come along for the ride. So let me ask you about search. Uh uh you told my my friend and colleague David Pierce that you're very proudly at number three in search. Uh one of the more famous decoder back and forths of all time is Sacha Nadella at the launch of Bing with ChatGPT said, I want to make Google dance. Every point of market share I can take from Google is billions of dollars for a bottom line. And then Sundar, who has a very different personality, came under Coder and was like, good good luck. Basically, like in his very Sundar way was like, he he wanted to say that I'd get a rise out of you, but like what I'm not reacting to that at all. And you can see how that played out. I don't think Microsoft took points of share off Google. Maybe ChatGPT did, but they don't have the monetization, right? They're they're furiously hiring people from meta to figure out how to monetize this new search behavior that they've created while Google is just gonna roll it out across their products. You're number three, you're sitting there, you're watching, you're watching this dance, you're rolling out AI search. Can you take points off of share off of Google and can you monetize them in a way that actually makes sense? It's 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 when they announced Bang that it was essentially a copy of of Ask dot 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. I was like, delete. I didn't I didn't mean for that to uh get out there. Um uh so you know, I've been through the search wars. The way that we look, I'm never gonna be in a worse position than where the Ask Jeeves brand was in two thousand one, two thousand two. 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 that the at the original product showed up 85% of the time was only 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 and launching what became one box on Google and doing all that. What we found is that if somebody was doing one point five searches a month on 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 for revenue. So that's how we got profitable and grew that company from the brink to uh 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 you know 250 million US users and 700 million global users in the Yahoo network in any given time. And there's a search box there. And you know, infrequently they use it. Um 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 outsource that. Um, and we had to do something to make sure that they kept doing those searches uh 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. Um, but are we gonna grow in search? I certainly hope so. And if we do, it's gonna 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. That they the next time they're on Yahoo for Mail or Fantasy or check their stocks, they'll do another one. And that really is this 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 of before profit. But that is old school. Who knows where that goes? But um but that has to be the starting point, and that's why we did it . We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute . Immerse yourself in Herbal Essence's new Moroccan Argan Oil Elixir infused with pure argan oil. Just one drop delivers up to 100 hours of hair nourishment with the indulgent scent of a Moroccan garden. Herbal Essence's new Moroccan Argon Oil Elixir spar quality hair repair without the price tag . Try it now. Herbal Essences. Surface repair to smoothness, nourishment with regimen use versus non-conditioning shampo o. Welcome back. I'm talking with Yahoo! CEO Jim Manzone about search and A I. You said earlier in this conversation that the original sin of Yahoo was giving search to Google, paying Google for the privilege of running the search box on Yahoo.com. I am guessing you did not buy 10 million NVIDIA GPUs to train your own model. Who is running your search right now? So we are working with uh with Anthropic with their lightweight uh model called Haiku. And there are a number of these. Actually, ChatGPT used to have one called nano that they kinda aren't really doing anymore. I've heard they might bring it back. But we're not displaying results from uh from Claude. It's it's results from our own data that is that they are processing essentially. So we send them a payload that is both all this amazing data from our knowledge graph, um, soon to be our user side, because we're about to launch personalization, um, 30 years of search history, all of our vertical content knowledge, and then we also are grounding with Bing. 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 results. So it's it is uh is a much it is definitely a much more affordable, uh, you know, kind of a McGyver way of doing it. But it actually, if you if you wind up, Eric Feng, who is the mastermind of this project, uh, who is our uh head of our research group and the head of our search group, um, would would phrase it as that Yahoo data, you know, plus haiku equals very competitive AI answer engine. And again, we're not gonna 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 uh agentic actions that you can take. Um and we've we with that launch, not only do we launch the Scout answer engine at scout.com, but uh we actually on the day of launch have embedded it within all of our other products. And so of course there's news summaries, but on there's a button in Yahoo! Finance that does analysis of a given stock on the fly. Um, it is in Ya Yahoo Mail uh to help, you know, summarize and process emails and extract really useful information. And there is a whole roadmap that you're gonna see, you know, with a lot of different you know, smaller announcements over the course of the year of things that uh you know it it will become very proactive. And I you know, if you remember the days of push, it's it's it's gonna be very push-oriented where you know, I think this category is going. And people use this for productivity at the core of Yahoo. And so I think this helps us also do that. At the same time, have a kick ass, you know, AI answer engine. So, you've got anthropic sort of the heart of it. I presume that that means you can take them out, right? If you need if there was a better vendor or a better partner or better deal terms, you could replace that little LM 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. Aaron Powell I didn't see that coming in the history of the consumer AI. That each each each 800-pound gorilla tries to do Don't worry. One day you're gonna open Claude and it's just gonna start serving you vertical social videos and we're gonna be like, how did we how did we arrive here again? Well, they're all already trying to do it, of course. But you know, Google has started to compete more with all of its you know uh providers over the years too. So that this isn't a lot of so how are you thinking about the dynamic, right? You've got this long history, you've you've got a core vendor in a position that looks a lot like the original SIN, right? You're you're 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 capability set. How do you avoid the cliff? Because it it it feels like right it rhymes with the past as you're pointing out. To tell you truth, look, our 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 I think we've we've come a long way. Uh we've climbed the mountain a bit and we we've made a lot of progress, especially in the industry. I think people know what's going on here. But you know, with the i if we hope to have like a new balance type comeback where it's it's got or the gap or the these places that have kind of been down but have you know have have have made this comeback and become you know really solid brands again, which is my aspiration for the Yahoo brand, we we have further to go to where um I think we're really you know, punching at the weight where I where I want to be. Um the reason why we've we're as good as we are is is because you know 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 what we inherited to a user basis large, I think worst case, you know, we are growing that audience at the core. And I I don't think we are big enough. I think uh an anthropic and a in a chat in a uh open ai have we're back to fish, but have have much bigger fish to fry than Yahoo. You know, we might be collateral damage on what they try and do. Absolutely. I've known since the start, and uh you know, others have said this that that you know you're you are tempting fate by by opening up a you know a a a way for consumers to access your product within a large language model. Like they they certainly over time will will try to take that on themselves. We've seen that every single time in this industry going back to AOL, to be honest. Um and we've seen, you know, so I I I think that is a danger for everybody. And I 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 I I think on this topic, people should be very careful on how they partner with the large language model on this going forward, because they will they will cut the big white bad wolf will come to your door and say everything's cool. That being said, Anthropic has been an amazing partner. Um they were they were really impressed by the McGyver move that Eric Fang and his team made and how we use haiku. Uh and in fact they're part of our press release for the launch of Scout and we're gonna be doing something at Southby together. So that partnership's really good and I I hope that it it lasts for a long time. The other uh big bad in all this is Google. We've brought them up several times. You know, Google has a big DSP. They have they compete in all the areas you're competing. They aggregate a bunch of news. Google Discover is the secret referrer to like 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 they're gonna all that's gonna play out in the end, but they're under a particular kind of pressure. Do you see that as an opportunity? Do you or do you see the way they run their ad tech stack as a particular kind of threat? Aaron Powell Man, I still think of Yahoo as being um as not being on the same, you know, to 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 Chat GPT and that was a generationally important product. I think Google probably had it in their labs working the same way. Oh no, they did. That's right. And I I don't know if you remember Danny Sullivan. Oh I know Danny well. Danny was the figurehead of search and ran the biggest search conference and you know all the SEOs who who didn't have their names in their business cards would be outside smoking and hanging out with Mac Cuts and all that whole that whole generation. Danny then ultimately went to work for Google and is is like a an evangelist for them. And I I've seen a presentation that he gave where 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, you know, 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 that 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. Yeah. Um, and uh, you know, frankly, I will do something very similar once we're through this beta period of distributing it through Scout through Yahoo. But you know, it's I do think they 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. Um I do not think that products that take nine steps of agentic whatever to monetize some outcome are going to be anywhere near as efficient as you know as you you clicking on links and them getting paid. And um 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 write to do a Super Bowl ad about us. I think you can do it in a way that is very clearly um you know paid and is con i it it is helpful on sh on co commercial queries. You know, I don't know if you remember, but Alta Vista tried to launch uh search advertising and and were shut down by the industry and ads and their articles and wired saying how dare you before Overture kind of made it okay before Google AdWords came along and and then really you know uh you know streamlined it and I 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 is in this new format that users might prefer. Um so that that is where we're headed and that that's the product I would like to to launch and see if it gets there. But that if Google doesn't get that right, it will be difficult. I'm very curious to see how these user interfaces evolve. Like I you I'm watching every day ChatGPT has like a new riff 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 you know 10 blue links have not been 10 blue links on Google for a long time. There's a lot of embedded native experiences on I'm curious to see that evolves. And you know, search advertising is the most lucrative business in the history of the world. So it feels like if that's up for grabs. The first draft of Scout is is I really I we've gotten a lot of great feedback on the UI and and um you know we have a lot of things that we want to add to it and improve about it. But um I think we I think you know we came out with a a a good first attempt and we'll we'll you know tweak it from here. And just be clear, the your your plan there is you're gonna 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. The 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 you know, for the people already using it, their 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 um part of the thesis of of the business plan for this was we have a huge user base just like Google does but in a you know smaller version, uh the poor man's version of being able to distribute the same way they've done with AI mode and put it you know on all the different surface areas so that is the home page and news and sports and fancy sports and you know every single version of that and we have new products coming. We launched three new fancy products last year one of which was was like a huge uh you know traffic driver. Um 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 and hopefully it goes from there. I want 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. You can see it with all these prediction markets. That is their big business. They they have a lot of money to throw around. They've captured a bunch of lobbyists. There's I would say ev politics aside, the 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. And then stonks, and now there's just gambling. All of that has always felt like gambling to me. Crypto has always felt like one form of gambling. Stonks 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? Aaron Powell to the extent everybody does then yes. And by the way, we we do that in all kinds of places. Like we we really try extremely hard to be purple with ne ws. Um now the algorithm may take you left or right over time. Um 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 owned uh historically owned Caesars and currently owns the Venetian and the Palazzo. And the sports book at uh Venetian Palazzo is the Yahoo Sportsbook. Now we don't operate it, it's a branding thing, and there's all our content everywhere, whatever. We have had discussions since I got here about whether cause they are experts at it much more than we are. Should we do what fanatics has done and get into the bloodbath of of of gambling and should we you know 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. You know, we'll stay away from that. We'll be a distributor and we'll be the the, you know, we'll be the top of the funnel for all those. That's historically what we inherited about BetMGM. That's where we're gonna 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 as a news item. But we but we don't oper but we don't operate in either space. We just announced a deal with Coinbase as well, where we are linking to them for you know, if you're gonna be buying stocks or crypto. Yeah I'm I'm just more I mean you have a long history here. I'm I'm just asking maybe just about vibes, right? The finance, maybe the stock market has always been gambling, right? I 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 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 gonna 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's like a the reason the leagues kept gambling away and then the money have is infected sports and now everyone thinks there's an NFL script and all the games are rigged. And the ins and you can see players are getting in trouble. I wish I wish that script would include the forty niners winning. I wish it would include the Packers. I got some I got some real issues about the Packers in the second half of games, then I think we should talk to the script writers. Although Pat Pat Mahomes does get calls that nobody else does, and frankly, maybe it is scripted. Everyone thinks it's rigged. And it Taylor Swift won her first Super Bowl. That makes no sense to me. Um 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 gonna happen to news. The prediction markets are coming for the news organizations, for the aggregators, they're partnering with Reuters. Like something else is gonna 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 n 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? It would have to be a really big check, which I don't think is is out there. At this point, it really is information in a link. Um, you know, I think sports odds are incredibly fundamental. You know, I've been in a college betting pool with all my friends from UCLA for twenty plus years. It's one of my favorite things I do every year. And I finally won some this year. Um it it you have to have the odds and you have to have the information. And if you've you know looked on on uh you know these properties, Yahoo Sports, ESPN for years, like with number fire 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's it's is very much part of the spine of the book for what Yahoo Sports is about. Um so I do look at it as adjacent to that, and I don't want to give a political BS answer. I just don't 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 uh is a is a valid argument. And then I also understand the two-way contract side of it. And even on the insider trading, that 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. And if it is legal , it's incredibly popular. And it's a popular way that people are are it's it, you know, we always think about like what's the next step somebody's gonna take uh to accomplish whatever goal they're trying to achieve that day using our products that actually is a cheesy thing that we talk about and try to build for um and or try and do a better job at always over time. I can't think of a more fundamental next step downstream than than going to uh FanDuel or going to Coinbase after what you've learned on Yahoo Sports or Finance. So I do have to have it as as a core part of the product. I have to. Where that heads is gonna be decided at at you know rungs up the ladder from me, but I do get your point uh for sure on it. Dina, to me the comparison is to sugar or I don't know, booze. Like both legal, both incredibly popular, uh, and both obviously bad for you in excess. And there's a we've built a lot of norms around excess for those for sugar and booze. Like we we 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 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 you know I'm I'm saying it's refreshing to hear you talk about brand and uh 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 is there a line for you? 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 you know uh beverage companies, you know, from Bud Light. It's funny. Do you know, do you know why FDR law, uh sorry, why FDR won the nineteen thirty two election. Uh it was in Andrew Rossorkin's nineteen twenty nine book. Uh it it wasn't the uh depression. It was prohibition. Yeah. He wa you know. 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, you know, part of you know the next steps people are taking from our products. So I I do think we're a very relevant place for that. Um at the same time, we're we're not the right company to to operate them ourselves. So you you you won't see us going down that pathway most likely. Maybe one of them will try and buy us try and buy us and munch us in into it. But I could yeah, could see that potentially happening. But otherwise, you know, we're we're back in the aggregation zone. So that was my last question actually. We made it. You've listened to a lot of decoder, I can tell. Uh private equity usually wants an exit that might look like Yahoo Going public again, it might look like an acquisition. Do you do you have a preferred outcome in mind or do you have a timeline? Yeah, you always forget uh how 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. I just won 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 where we were yet. So it does tend to be a catnip topic about Yahoo that people are like, oh, when's the IPO? And you know, there's a lot of people out ahead of us who are trillion-dollar IPOs that are are probably first and and others that people are wondering about. I'd say I am building this thing so that we can be a healthy public company again.