As Yahoo marked its 30th anniversary this spring, the company leaned into nostalgia with a vibrant 90s-themed celebration at its New York office complete with banners, hanging cassette tapes, and images of Rubik’s cubes. For CEO Jim Lanzone, who took the helm in 2021, the retro décor was more than just a tribute to the past—it was a reflection of the company’s enduring presence in a fast-changing internet landscape.
Reflecting on Yahoo’s journey since Jerry Yang and David Filo launched “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” at Stanford, Lanzone noted on LinkedIn that the company’s history has been “marked by many ups and a few downs,” but added that “most companies don’t make it this far at all.”
That legacy brings both brand power and baggage. The phrase “bleeding purple” once symbolized deep internal loyalty, but also hinted at a history of constant reinvention amid declining valuations and changing ownership. Yahoo peaked at a $125 billion valuation, but in 2021, Apollo Global Management acquired it from Verizon for under $5 billion.
Still, Yahoo remains one of the most visited destinations online, with 3 billion site visits last month—surpassing Amazon, according to Similarweb. Comscore reports that nearly 90% of online Americans engage with Yahoo monthly, including substantial numbers of Millennials and Gen Z. “We were able to pick up this incredible asset that, if you took the name Yahoo off of it, is one of a kind,” Lanzone said. He also described Apollo’s purchase as a “one-time-only, incredible price.”
Yahoo’s audience persistence—whether through email, finance, or fantasy sports—has long made it attractive. But previous leaders struggled to capitalize on that audience. Lanzone’s challenge now is to transform the 30-year-old platform into a modern digital force capable of winning back advertisers and evolving with users.
“We had to come in here and think about why Yahoo exists,” Lanzone explained. Revisiting its founding mission—serving as a trusted guide through “the Wild West of the internet”—he emphasized the need to reframe that goal for today’s digital world, filled with misinformation, spam, and AI-generated content. “It’s like the quote from The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy living or get busy dying.”
A Three-Phase Strategy: Fix, Rebuild, Innovate
Lanzone’s turnaround blueprint unfolded in distinct stages. “Phase one of the turnaround is always [assembling] the team and the structure and fixing things,” he said. “Then you earn the right to start rebuilding things. The next phase on top of that is true innovation, unexpected things.”
The initial “fix” included laying off over 1,600 employees from its advertising technology division in 2023 and closing a struggling automated ad business. Yahoo then restructured its focus around a new demand-side platform and re-established dedicated ad sales teams for key verticals—Finance, News, and Sports.
Since then, Yahoo has revamped almost every major product, including a near-total redesign of its homepage. The company has also made strategic acquisitions—Common Stock (social investing), Wagr (sports betting), and The Factual (news credibility ratings)—while selling off non-core assets such as TechCrunch and Rivals.
“It’s just a very different company than it was in 2021,” Lanzone said. To reinforce this narrative, Yahoo aired its first Super Bowl ad since 2002, featuring actor Bill Murray interacting with fan emails sent to a live Yahoo Mail inbox. Lanzone noted that local ad buys made the campaign “very cost-effectively.”
Leadership by Passion and Performance
“The hardest thing to do is to build a brand,” Lanzone observed, underscoring his strategy of combining existing talent with fresh entrepreneurial energy. At Yahoo, he has sought out high-potential employees internally and complemented them with proven innovators from outside.
His senior hires include Chief Marketing Officer Josh Line (formerly at Paramount Global) and Rob Wilk, head of global consumer sales, who joined from Snap. Lanzone emphasized, “A players don’t just weed out B players; they also attract other A players.”
Key qualities he looks for include subject matter expertise, emotional intelligence—“people with high EQ are high on productivity [and] low on politics”—ambition, and what he calls “love of the game.” “Our culture is people who love the mission, [and] love the idea of putting Yahoo back on the map.”
Charting a Course Through the AI Era
Private ownership under Apollo has made it difficult to assess Yahoo’s financials, but Lanzone insists the company is “very profitable.” Apollo has also described the Yahoo acquisition as one of its quickest-returning investments.
Unlike previous cost-cutting buyers, Apollo’s focus has been growth. “The pressure on me and my team is growth,” Lanzone said. He signaled interest in further expansion beyond Yahoo’s current pillars of finance, news, and sports: “One hundred percent. More than one. We’ve looked; we’ve been a part of discussions on that.”
While he’s wary of overpaying in a competitive M&A market, he remains open to the right opportunity. One of his most significant acquisitions to date is Artifact, an AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram’s co-founders. Lanzone said it more than doubled usage of Yahoo’s news app and fits into his broader vision of embedding AI across Yahoo’s ecosystem, from mail and search to fantasy sports.
The rapid evolution of AI presents both opportunity and existential risk. “If we put our heads in the sand, we’re just going to get trampled on,” Lanzone warned. “If we don’t innovate and get out ahead of it, we die.” He likened companies that ignore these changes to characters in Don’t Look Up who fail to heed warnings of an impending disaster.
Search is among the areas he sees most vulnerable to disruption from AI. But Lanzone remains optimistic: “I would love to be able to start competing in that space with a search audience as big as mine, with a user base as large as mine, with the personal relationship that we have with all of our users.”
That relationship dates back to Yahoo’s early slogan: “a nice place to stay on the internet.” Now, Lanzone envisions Yahoo playing a similar role in the new digital frontier shaped by artificial intelligence and shifting user behavior.
As for a potential return to public markets, Lanzone says it’s too early to tell. “We’ve got the revenue model ripping, but that’s just the start of it,” he said. “We’re still early in what we think we can do here… But do I think we have a tiger by the tail? Yes.”
