The Grill Room Can Yahoo Survive in a Hyper-Niche World?
Dec 9, 2025
Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo, shares insights into the company's turnaround since its acquisition by Apollo. He discusses Yahoo’s strategy focused on finance, sports, and mail, emphasizing the importance of loyal users and modern revenue streams. Lanzone delves into Yahoo’s AI ambitions, addressing both its threats and opportunities in the evolving digital landscape. He highlights the company's strengths in performance advertising and potential growth in sports and finance, while exploring Yahoo's brand identity as a valuable consumer product.
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Value In Distribution And Turnaround
- Apollo bought Yahoo for its distribution, loyal users, and opportunity to modernize revenue rather than to chase trillion-dollar scale.
- Jim Lanzone framed the turnaround as improving product, team, and monetization to realize steady growth.
First-Party Moat From Multiple Utilities
- Yahoo's strengths are aggregated utilities: finance, sports, mail, and homepage aggregation with high direct and logged-in traffic.
- Over 75% of visits are direct and the average user uses multiple Yahoo properties monthly, creating a unique first-party moat.
Artifact Acquisition Became The News Backbone
- Yahoo acquired Artifact because the team were users and Artifact's AI recommendation tech was ahead of Yahoo's internal capabilities.
- They converted the Yahoo News app into Artifact and saw double-digit growth afterward.