Dylan Byers: When Apollo bought Yahoo for $5 billion—a significant discount from its $125 billion heyday—what did they see? What were those early conversations like, about the goal and the turnaround strategy? What were you trying to achieve on day one?

Jim Lanzone: Yahoo had all the bones of a great internet turnaround: massive traffic, a company that had seen better days, and a team that had been through the wringer—inside a telecom company for five years after having been a struggling public company for many years before that. There had been a lot of industry whiplash. But the hardest thing to get in this industry is distribution.

The key was not comparing Yahoo to the trillion-dollar companies that it’s not, but appreciating it for what it is. We were lucky to do that in September 2021, without the hangover of losing search to Google or relitigating every past mistake. When you look at it clearly, you see hundreds of millions of very loyal users, top-ranked properties in incredibly important categories, first-party relationships with a huge percentage of those users, and a revenue engine that needed to be modernized. If you do those things right, you can have a great outcome. So that was the thesis.

Dylan: Let’s talk about what Yahoo is. It’s a conglomerate of different services. From a consumer perspective, what are the greatest strengths of that suite of products?

Yahoo is still strongest where it started: being the guide to the internet. Whether it’s finance, sports, or news, those are three categories where we’re still number one or number two. We’re number two in email. Yahoo Mail has hundreds of millions of users. It’s obviously smaller than Gmail, but to operate and build a company like this, you have to appreciate it for what it is: a massive footprint in email with extremely loyal, active users. We’re also number three in search, which is an incredibly lucrative category. And again, we don’t get those users because they choose Yahoo over Google—we get them because they’re already in our network.

We do get traffic in distributed ways—you don’t reach this scale without that—but more than 75 percent of our visits are direct, and over 75 percent of our ad impressions come from logged-in users. Everyone brings their own bias about what Yahoo is to them. Someone will say, “I don’t use Yahoo,” and then realize, “Wait, I use Yahoo Finance all the time.” They just don’t think about it that way. It’s the same way people use other major networks: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp; Google, YouTube, and their other properties. We’re a network in the same sense. We’re smaller, but still extremely large relative to most companies. And that’s really the opportunity.

Julia Alexander: Yahoo started as the front page of the internet. Then the web shifted to social and mobile, and eventually into closed platforms. What’s interesting about Yahoo now is that it sits in the middle—you aggregate, you link out, you still send traffic downstream. Where does growth come from next?

From the beginning, Yahoo’s role has been as the guide to the web. Even early search engines like Inktomi and AltaVista were cataloguing the web—Google just did it better, and Yahoo essentially handed it over. At the time, that looked like good user service and terrible business strategy. But linking out has always been part of Yahoo’s DNA. We’ve historically sent enormous amounts of traffic downstream through partnerships and revenue-share deals. After losing search, the company tried to become a first-party content company—even a Hollywood company for a while—but the core strength was always aggregation. We’ve doubled down on that. We’re not chasing scoops. Journalism happens elsewhere. Where we create content, it’s contextual—fantasy analysis, market wrap-ups, tools that help people make decisions. And we’re proud of our role in the ecosystem as a distributor.

Julia: Do you see “Google Zero” as a threat or an opportunity?

It’s definitely a threat. We’re already seeing the traffic impact on publishers. Content companies won’t be able to rely on micro-payments after their work has been scraped—that doesn’t scale. Subscription works for some, like what you guys do, but free content still needs an economic model. That chapter still has to be written, but I think people have to prioritize it.

The open web could be under threat, especially with A.I. interfaces that look more like academic papers with citations than a true exchange of value. For the web to survive, publishers have to survive. Those sites need traffic and sustainable businesses—or else the whole system collapses into synthetic data and slop.

Dylan: Let’s talk about monetization. Programmatic advertising isn’t exactly a growth story. What’s the monetization strategy?

Programmatic works only if you have performance at scale—and that comes from first-party relationships. We see trillions of user events a year, and that data converts. That’s why we built the Yahoo DSP. Advertisers, from Netflix to Spotify, use it to target Yahoo users across the internet. We win about 90 percent of head-to-head DSP tests because we actually convert. We’ll always be smaller than Google and Amazon, but we’re bigger than everyone else—and that’s a very good business. The scale is extremely rare to be able to have an audience that performs on advertising. Otherwise, you’re in the realm of just branding.