GoKawiilToday, 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?
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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 platform, or SSP, is tech that an app, site, or platform can use to sell space to advertisers. You’ve got inventory — that’s supply — and advertisers use the SSP to buy that inventory. Yahoo had a big SSP, but Jim shut it down a couple years ago 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 platform does automated auctions across sites and apps to display the ads. This is the big money — it’s how Google makes so much money on the web, for example.
A big DSP doesn’t just deliver ads on the web or in apps, either. You’ll hear Jim talk about CTV, which stands for connected TVs. All those ads in streaming apps? Delivered by big DSPs, including Yahoo’s, which works with Netflix and Spotify.
Okay: Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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