Four things about Yahoo News that may surprise you
It's one of the most popular news sites in the country, and it's wildly profitable. It might be the right time for Yahoo to bounce back.
I still think Yahoo is undervalued: clearly not a tech darling, it’s quietly been chugging along, running one of the most popular news sites in the world alongside a raft of other services. None of it is pushing the envelope, particularly, but it does seem to be executing very well, and the team behind it is on an explicit mission to revitalize the brand.
This is the right approach, in my opinion — and clearly it’s working:
“Lanzone says Yahoo, owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management since 2021, has billions in revenue. “It is very profitable,” he told Decoder’s Nilay Patel.
“Having direct deals with publishers to have their content aggregated with us has actually been part of the history of the company going back two-plus decades,” Lanzone says at one point. “We send them traffic and, in many cases, share revenue.””
It’s more recently made that strategy cleaner: it’s not trying to do its own reporting, but instead is surfacing other peoples’ and providing reach.
The underlying ethos seems to be to point to great content on the web rather than being the originator of it. In a world where other platforms, Google included, are trying to be the all-encompassing destination, it’s a web-first way to look at the world. That revitalization is right on time.
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