Jim Lanzone is one of my favorite people in the media business. We do this every year at Cannes. We have a great time back, and I'm going to embarrass him for a little bit. Jim Lanzone is one of the most human executives that I know. He is such a fun person. He loves music. He's on the board of the Newport Folk Festival, and that's why Yahoo has the best concerts. Sorry, Spotify. Everyone better come to Diplo on Wednesday. Um, Jim Lanzone, thank you for joining us.
Good. Good to be here. We're back.
You're back. We're back. All right, Jim. Um, what a what a ride Yahoo has had. So, Apollo buys Yahoo from Verizon Media. Nobody knows what to expect. Everyone thought that it was a company left for the dead. I wrote that. And we know, we know. And then you guys come in, you sell off assets quickly, you alleviate the debt, you make some difficult decisions, but you immediately turn the company into a pretty profitable engine with no debt, and you start making acquisitions. Walk us through the phase where Yahoo is now, because in my mind it was clean the books, make the investments. What's happening now?
Um, well, look, it's uh you'll hear similar things I think from uh my my friend Neeraj from next door as well. It was who by the way was employee 84 of Yahoo. Uh and uh we we just came and we actually to put it in we just had a reunion on the beach at our beach club earlier today. So of all the Yahoo and AOL former employees, Neeraj was invited. He was very busy. Uh but it was amazing. They all yodeled as you might expect. Um, look for to to get and this is the the original thesis for wanting to come take the company over for both me and all the people who came with me to join the company like to be able to get an asset like this this huge with this many users that to your point has been through the ringer over the years uh and probably hadn't put its best uh foot forward on on things like product which is where it all starts. So, uh, so to me, and again, this is why I feel like it's still early for us in a lot of ways, we just got to work rebuilding every single product that we operate, and it had been a long time since I think the best versions and most current modern versions of all Yahoo products were were out there. Um, and so with just within the last 9 months, basically every pixel on Yahoo is new. Every major product that we operate has been relaunched. Uh, and so you would think, oh, a 30-year company because we had our 30th uh, birthday this year, but just on Friday, we had our highest number of iOS users ever of the Yahoo Mail app on the heels of a big launch that we did last week, launching all these new AI features, and we did some marketing around that. Um, you know, that and that doesn't just happen. That takes some really amazing people to come in and get a a hold of this asset and start to cook a bit.
Okay, let's talk about what you're cooking. So when you all came and took over Yahoo, you made it very clear that you saw sort of a few big buckets. There's Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, sort of uh Yahoo Mail, and then there's the Yahoo News entertainment sort of environment. Um, why did you choose those buckets? Like there are assets that are falling outside of those buckets that you've decided not to invest in. You divested TechCrunch, for example. Um, what about those four assets? Was it just that they were the biggest or that they had the most promise?
So it all goes back to the mission of Yahoo which we just had Jerry Yang back for um for an all hands meeting and we talked about this that the you know when you picked up the company we had to reestablish the mission like you know why are we here and what are the next 30 years going to look like and it turned out that if you really peeled it apart why does Yahoo still have hundreds of millions of users a month it's where we are strongest is where we are still the trusted guide to the internet for our users in the C in these categories and the ones you mentioned sports, finance, news are some of them. Communications and utilities products are others and that's where it is you know we're still top five in the US top five globally and people would be surprised but we are top five with Gen Z and top five in what total traffic total number of users um even products like mail 50% of our users are millennial or Gen Z's so the audience has evolved with us where we have continued to keep the faith as the trusted guide to the internet now you have to reimagine what that looks like from 2021 when we picked it up and let's say we really got rolling a year or so later forward. Um and what I'd say is most of the categories you mentioned I would just say we're completely underinvested in. So just take sports as one example. Yes, we've relaunched we have an amazing new team led by Ryan Spoon who spent many years at ESPN. Um and we have brand new versions of our fantasy app. We have brand new versions of the of the main sports app. Um but we also are now doing 50 hours of programming a week. And that wasn't, you know, understood before that you had that much potential behind the Yahoo Sports brand. Now, as we roll into 2026, our our sports betting deal is up with BetMGM after many years of a deal that Verizon had done. And so, there's just a huge amount of opportunity there if you build behind the user base with great products. And that is such a core basic on on consumer internet, which is, you know, our bread and butter. So, that's what we're doing category by category.
And then when you think about these categories, what do you think the future of them is? Because some of them are absolute behemoths. Like you could probably spin one out and IPO it. You could sell one. Like is the idea that each one of them has its own track and own future or would you think one day maybe Yahoo just stays itself together as a behemoth goes public or sells or something like that?
Well, people are always very interested in the pieces. Um, but I would say we are strongest together as as one unified Yahoo as an ecosystem of very strong brands that operate independently in their categories. So yes, every one of the brands you mentioned has competitors. They're very different from each other. Uh, and we put teams in charge with general managers and heads of product and heads of engineering and heads of content to go after those verticals independently. But then they all weave together. You know, I I kind of call it at the federal level. We have patriotism for Yahoo overall. And where it really adds up and comes together, not to be too on the nose about it because here we are and Cannes is to have this level of traffic, this scale, but perform the way we do with with uh on the advertising side convert the way we do is just extremely rare. And so that happens across the ecosystem. We have a first party relationship with more people than most properties. And the number that come along that have traffic at this level, it's like one every 3 to 5 years. Right now it's ChatGPT. Before that it was TikTok. Before that it was Snapchat. I mean it just does not happen very often. If you look in the top 10, it's amazing how many of these companies started in the '90s. So you have this rare asset if you're to nurture it the right way and the payoff is actually on the advertising side where we truly convert. Uh and so this year we this sounds odd because it for 10 years this wasn't the case. We relaunched our own advertising Salesforce. So, Yahoo Ads is brand new again. Um, and we now are selling directly, not just programmatically for all these. At the same time, we have the world's largest private DSPs. So, we compete with Trade Desk, Google, Amazon. Uh, and just today, we announced signing Netflix. They're now part of our ecosystem. Um, so that only happens though through the entire ecosystem working as as one. And so I really do think the power of Yahoo uh is as a uh you know as one as one thing.
I want to get your take on AI because Yahoo where it has power is syndication. You know you guys are intentionally when you create content it's for fans of niches but it's not necessarily like news publishing or anything like that. So what is the role that AI plays for you? Do you see yourself doing licensing deals? Do you see yourself bringing AI chatbots onto your sites? What's the plan?
Oh, the chatbots are already all over our sites.
No, but I mean like your own custom chatbot.
No, the um so nothing to announce on that front. Um what I would say is we've since the beginning, I mean I think ChatGPT landing in November of 2022 hit the industry like a ton of bricks. It was something very different. It was applicable to basically every consumer product in in existence. And for us, we woke right up and started building products or acquiring some like we talked about last year with Artifact and and news. Um, so email, search, news, fantasy sports, investing, they all have AI specific features that we've launched as part of those. Yahoo and the DSP helping um build campaigns and target them in automated fashion. So we've we've put AI to work product by product so far. Is there a larger order bit with AI across our portfolio? Um, nothing to announce today.
Okay. But stay that that reads like a stay tuned. So, I'm just going to say stay tuned.
We're working on a lot of things.
