Can Yahoo Reinvent Itself? I Doubt It, But at Least It’s Trying.

One of the most interesting media stories of the week so far, IMO, has to be 雅虎 ’s purchase of AI-driven news reader Artifact .

It’s not that I used Artifact all that much or, at all, after some initial playing around. Or that I think it was an app that the world particularly needs, as I wrote here.

What is exciting to me about Yahoo's plans to integrate Artifact’s tech is it can be read as a declaration to widely integrate AI features into a scaled, mainstream digital media property. In covering the deal, The Verge wrote that the roll-out would both happen “slowly” and “soon,” so how quickly AI will start to power Yahoo feeds is a little unclear. And it sounds like things will start with personalization and recommendations, which makes sense. But hopefully some of Artifact’s more experimental features, like article summaries and synthetic audio, will also see their way into Yahoo products.

I’m hard pressed right now to point to any super interesting AI use cases I’m seeing in the media world. Sure, you find a chatbot here or there on sites, along with some AI-powered content, but major publishing players have mostly been reticent to launch anything big. I chalk this up chiefly to issues of copyright and IP, but I also think public shamings of companies that have hosted (often bad) AI content have slowed the slow roll-out too. There is also the poor state of the media business; it’s hard to innovate when you’re worried about your core business falling apart. But someone has to start experimenting to figure out what works, what consumers want, and how these new experiences will monetize.?

So good on Yahoo for looking to innovate. While I knew Yahoo retained a significant audience, I was surprised at its current size. Yahoo News alone has 185 million monthly users, according to Kat Downs Mulder . That is a big surface to test AI-powered products and it is a big number for a collection of properties that few folks I know actually use, at least openly

I still have a Yahoo email dating back to my college days that I use as my secondary email for promotional emails, retail sites, and travel booking. But I cringe every time I give it to a real person. I occasionally use Yahoo Finance to do research on a company, partly because they aggregate a bunch of financial news sources (some pretty low quality, but still…) and the The Wall Street Journal ’s search function is horrible. For fantasy sports, I use ESPN or CBS and I get my news directly from 纽约时报 and WSJ, long form from the The New Yorker , and industry news largely from newsletter subscriptions. For aggregation, I rely on recommendations from friends via text or folks I follow on social.?

There is no question that Yahoo’s design and experience can use some updating. Yahoo Finance apparently got a refresh in November, but many parts of the site, including the home page and Yahoo News, look like they were last touched a decade ago when Marissa Mayer was still CEO. (I once attended a partner meeting on the Yahoo campus and Mayer arrived with all the ceremony of a presidential candidate. I was surprised she wasn’t carried in on a palanquin.)

Yahoo clearly has much better leadership these days. PE-owner Apollo claims to have already recouped its $5B investment for taking Yahoo and AOL off Verizon’s hands in 2021. Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone seems like a strong operator with experience across media and utilities. He has done an impressive job of recruiting talent to reinvigorate the core verticals of sports, finance and mail, while finally giving up on the quixotic quest to compete with Google in ad tech. Now, we’ll see if Lanzone and team bring back innovation and growth to Yahoo. Or maybe it will just sail along like a digital media ghost ship powered by legacy and web inertia. Either way, at least they are trying new things.

If you’re interested in talking about media and AI or just want to chat about your secret Yahoo mail habit, please reach out to me at Mount Prospect Partners.