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Thank you so much to Beehiiv for their support. Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. I'm joined today by Kat Downes Mulder. Kat is the SVP and General Manager of Yahoo! News and Home.
She is a veteran of the Washington Post. We're gonna start... We're gonna have to start talking there because yesterday was a very difficult day for the Post. But I wanna get all into what Yahoo!
is building, but as I said, Kat, I'm gonna start on a down note with the Post. I'd be remiss if I didn't.
Obviously, not a great day really for the Post or, or publishing, and y-you spent almost fifteen years there, right? Yep. Yeah. Almost fifteen years.
And, you know, you were Chief Product Officer and the Managing Editor there. Obviously difficult, but, like, what is your diagnosis? I m- obviously, you left in twenty twenty-two. What is...
What's your diagnosis of sort of what went wrong? 'Cause, I mean, like, in some ways...
And, and look, there's, there's time to, to, to patch it up, but, like, we, we are thirteen years into when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post.
And at Digiday, I had reporters who wrote a- all these stories about, like, the amazing progress that was being made there in the early years, and, and then things kinda went a little sideways. Yeah.
I mean, it's been a while since I was there. I wasn't there since twenty twenty-two. Gosh, it's awful what's happening there. It's, uh, really sad. Really just...
I've been in contact with tons of friends and colleagues who were laid off in this latest round or who are still there, all of whom were doing tremendously important work.
I mean, I obviously believe very, very deeply in the mission of The Washington Post, having spent, like you said, fifteen years there in a variety of different roles, and believe that the, the role of the institution is critically important and that it is j- one of many journalism institutions that we need to play an important role in the functioning of society.
So I'm really sad that this has happened. You know, and I'm sure there are a lot of reasons for it.
I can't speak to the, the most recent reasons and what's sort of going on there, but I'm really hopeful that they figure it out and that they continue to do great work.
I mean, there's still a lot of really good people there who are working hard to put out the news and continue to hold the powerful to account. So I'm very optimistic that that happens.
I mean, it's been, it's been painful, but we're just gonna have to kinda, I think, help those who, who've left, who've left The Post ideally find, find new ways to, to participate in journalism in the future, and I'm hopeful that their talent lands in- Mm-hmm...
in, in good places. Yeah, and I think one of the concerning things is, like, a lot of this, it, you know... Some of it is trying to unpack what's specific to, to The Post and what is a broader structural change.
That is obviously layoffs, and this, these were, like, big cuts at a very marquee- Mm-hmm... publication.
But, you know, in there, you know, they've, they've suffered a lot of the same exogenous, you know, pressures- Yeah... that a lot of publishers have faced, and particularly it's hit news publishers hardest, right?
So I'm just wondering, like, what... 'Cause, uh, you know, look, I've talked to, uh, spoken to, to lots of people, and some people are like, "Maybe these businesses just don't work."
Like, honestly, I've, I've gotten, like, s-some of them, I'm like, "Okay, if, if they can't figure it out, then, like, is this, is, are any of these businesses gonna work?" Like, I, I really do think...
I know you probably wanna move past this, but, like- [chuckles]... it's really a bad situation because people are questioning whether this is even a viable field, honestly.
Well, I think there's lots of examples of where it is viable, and there's lots of places that are being really creative about trying to figure it out. Look, it's not easy. I mean, we all know that.
Like, there is a tremendous amount of structural pressure on the publishing industry, and everybody's trying to adapt to that, whether it's AI or social or changing user habits or the rise of misinformation. Like, it...
All of that creates a really difficult environment to operate in, not to mention, you know, monetization pressures and all that comes with that.
I mean, it, it's a hard environment to operate in, but I am a strong believer that we will figure it out, and the market economy is leading to all kinds of interesting solutions.
The rise of the creator economy is really interesting. You know, people driving, you know, broadening their businesses to include more products and tools. Of course, New York Times is a classic example.
You got places like Semaphore doing more with events. You've got more boutique- Mm-hmm... and niche, niche places really focused, laser-focused on their audience, which does work, right, for driving- Mm-hmm...
loyalty in the audience and attracting the right advertisers.
So there are models that work, but I think it takes a tremendous amount of discipline and focus, consistency in the way that you manage thatAnd, you know, there's no doubt that it's hard, but I think there is a path forward.
So just like to, to move it to Yahoo, like, what, what do you see as, as Yahoo's role now in the publishing ecosystem?
'Cause, like, I, I mean, I've, I've, I've covered Yahoo for, for a long time, and it's gone through so many different iterations, right? And in some, and in some ways, like, it almost...
I don't wanna say it got forgotten, but it was, like, kind of like, "Oh, yeah, Yahoo," you know? And Yahoo's like, you know, again, it has gone through a bunch of different lives, you know? Yeah.
Remember the Carol, the Carol Decker experience? Like, I remember that. [laughs] I liked that. She cussed a lot. It was fun. But talk to me about what Yahoo is, is now. Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Yahoo's been through a lot. Yahoo's been through 30 years. We just celebrated our 30th birthday recently, and there's always ups and downs as you get to a birthday that big. Yeah.
But t- you know, today I think our function is, is much like what h- what Yahoo was when it started out. You know, our role is to help people find the best content on the internet.
It's to help them have a starting point for their day. It's to help them bring it all together and, and bring clarity to the chaos and make sense in the noise. You know, we think about that, providing that signal a lot.
So in a world that's increasingly chaotic, w- where do you start making sense of it all? And we wanna be that, we wanna be that starting point.
And I think that starting point has tremendous value today because the internet is so... I mean, and just increasingly fractured, and information everywhere, and don't know what to trust.
And so having a space where, you know, the content is vetted and quality and the services that you need access to are brought together in one space, I think is a tremendous advantage, advantage for Yahoo, and I think that function is, is critically important in this moment, and we're, we're building on that.
Okay, so, like, the portal is back. Portal is back. [laughs] But it's the, you know, it's mo- it's the modern portal, right? Like- Right...
you're not necessarily looking for addresses of websites, you know, where you may have been doing that 30 years ago, you know? The portal, the portal never left. It just evolved- Right...
to where now we're, now we're thinking about how do we help you find the most interesting creators or how do we help you find authoritative publishers on a certain topic, or how do we help guide you to the right product to buy, or, you know, the, the...
how do we help you, like, compose the right email responses to things, right? All of those things are kind of relevant and important to you, and we know that people are juggling too much.
Not just, you know, too much information, but too many things to do. Too m- too long of to-do lists. And so that function of really helping them and synthesize and orient them, I think is more important than ever. Right.
So just to unpack it, like, I mean, Yahoo, like it- it's interesting 'cause as a portal, like, you're, you're a publisher, but you're also an aggregator. But more than that, like, you're, you're a utility provider.
You know, people come- Mm-hmm... to Yahoo. Like, not many publishers can, can really say that they're gonna be the start of people's days. You know, maybe The New York Times, maybe a few others. But really, that's...
Typing, typing publisher URLs into a browser, I don't know. Like, maybe I, maybe I have spent too much time on X with the, "You've got a year left," like, because AI is gonna, like, take over everything.
I just, I don't know, but I just don't believe that that is gonna be the future of publishing. I just... It's just hard for me to believe that. But people check their email all the time, and they check their- Mm-hmm...
stock portfolios. And, you know, that combination of, of utility with, you know, aggregation and now differentiated search products seems like it could be something, something pretty interesting.
Like, explain, explain how that flywheel works because, you know, right now a lot of the distribution patterns are changing quite a bit on, on the internet, and, and most publishers are dealing with steep declines, particularly from search traffic.
Yeah. So I mean, I think that's one of the things that Yahoo is unique with and that I...
You know, one of the reasons that, that I joined Yahoo is we're sort of reinventing all of our products and rethinking the value that we can add into the world.
We have a tremendous amount of utility products and overlapping products that build daily habit, and that bundle of things is, is a really powerful tool.
So we have a massive amount of direct traffic, audiences who have loved Yahoo products and audiences that are really responding well and deepening their engagement with our existing products, and that's because, you know, the, the, the, the most engaged Yahoo users are using multiple products, right?
So it's a large body of direct users and then users of multiple products within the Yahoo portfolio.
So, like, 80% of the people that come to the homepage are using multiple Yahoo products, whether that's mail or whether that's search or now Scout, whether that's fantasy or portfolios, right?
And so we try to bring those tools together in a way that helps them connect, you know, not just learning something from a piece of content, but then taking those next actions into doing something, managing your fantasy team, managing your portfolio, et cetera.
I think that combination of things is really, is really powerful and useful, and what we've been trying to do is take that direct audience and deepen that engagement and through that add value, you know, that attracts a newer audience.
And I think that's really been working.
When you look across our portfolio, we've reinvented everything over the past few years, really with an eye towards serving those audiences and deepening that engagement to create resilient, you know, resilient user base that's gonna stick with us over time, despite changes in, in the overall ecosystem.
Yeah. So how much direct traffic does Yahoo have? A, a really significant amount. More than three-quarters of our traffic is direct. Right, and most publishers [laughs] cannot, cannot say that.
So I mean, in some ways it is interesting because, like, through all the changes that, that Yahoo has gone through, like, this is fair- fair- fairly similar to-How it was originally.
I remember, remember Terry Semel used to, you know, de- describe it because I think he came from parks, like, like an amusement park. You come in, and there's different rides, and you go on different- Yeah...
you know, you [chuckles] but you, but once you get into the park, you know, there's all sorts, sorts of different things that you can... You know, so tell me about the news, the, the, the role then of news in that.
Because I think the, I think the role of news is changing in a, in a lot of ways, and I think we're in the midst of that.
Like, there's always gonna be news obsessives and people who go directly to news sources or people who need news to do their job, et cetera.
But in many ways, I, I feel like news will become a feature and in many cases of other products. Mm-hmm. And in some ways, like within companies, the reality is the news is a support for other things.
You mentioned, you mentioned Semafor. Like, you know, the majority of their business is not directly monetizing news. It isn't. And you look at Time, you look at most of the magazine brands, they're, it's- Mm-hmm...
in support of a different, a different type of business, and I, I believe that is inevitable. I mean, you could even argue Bloomberg is in support of the, the terminal really at the end of the day. Mm-hmm.
So talk to me a- about how, how news fits into that. So yeah, I'm a big believer in that, like, news is a, something that works best with a complement of other utilities and services- Mm-hmm... that create loyalty.
So that, that's what it is for us as well.
Like, news is a, news is part of a whole environment, and if you look at things like our homepage redesign or our app redesign, you'll see that there's a, there's a lot of these services together with the news, right?
And what the news helps to do is create a point of orientation, a point of accessibility, right? To answer that question of what's going on in the world and what's relevant.
I think that continues to be important, but it's not the, the only thing that people need, right? They need to be able to take that information and act on it.
And so we've been really focused on that, using informa- you, you know, helping people find the news that they need to know, and then once they get that news, sort of what do, what do they do with it?
What do they, what next steps do they take after they, they get it? I think people continue to wanna know what's going on, right? It just looks a little bit different than it did years ago, right?
Because it's originating from so many places. It's not traditional text, you know, necessarily. It's changing in a lot of ways. But I think that orientation piece remains important.
So in all of the, you know, in all of these tools, it might not be called news, but the information product is still, it's still an essential aspect. It's just not the only thing. Right. Okay.
And so explain, like, how you balance like sort of the original... I mean, 'cause Yahoo is like both a publisher and an aggregator. Mm-hmm. And kind of always has been.
I guess in the early days it wasn't as much of a publisher. But how do you balance that? I mean, because you're like, you're both, you're a partner for publishers, but then you're also like an original.
Obviously, Yahoo Finance is a massive property, Yahoo Sports, et cetera. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, so we think about it as complementary.
So a huge amount of what we do is, is aggregation, now a thousand plus publisher partners, and our users get a lot of value from that.
I think they love getting news from a variety of sources, and that's a, a, a powerful advantage. We also create some content.
The content that we create in Yahoo News specifically, in news, entertainment, and life, is really about adding context and helping people, helping people, you know, figure out what's going on and sort of again guide them through some of that aggregated stuff.
We don't produce a tremendous amount of originals. We really don't wanna duplicate what we have already from our aggregated content, so we're focused on sort of how do we add an additional layer of value.
A lot of our original resources are, you know, not just writing, writing stories or doing live coverage, pulling together stuff that some of our partners are doing, but also on sort of curation, which is finding the good stuff and sort of explaining which things you wanna go to and why.
But I think that original content helps to provide that additional layer of signal on the noise, whether it's through content by people you know and like, people like Kelsey Weekman, who covers entertainment for us, or through, you know, just content that helps synthesize the other stuff in the network.
Right. You know what I miss? I miss Yahoo News Digest. The, the Summly- Yeah... I mean, that was one of the, one of the, like, million, like, Yahoo acq- acquisitions over the years that [chuckles] was, was Summly.
A very, it was a smaller one, but, like, I thought that- Mm-hmm... was a really good product. I'm just gonna put it out there. If you wanna bring it back, bring it back. But... It was a good product.
[laughs] And some of the spirit of a, of a Yahoo Digest is in the Yahoo News app today. Some of the spirit is in there.
I know they say that, but it was like, it was finishable, and I think, I forget the guy's name, Nick D'Alessandro or something, like, they, who started it. Mm-hmm. Yep. He was a young guy. He was really...
I saw him speak one time. He was really smart. Mm-hmm. And he probably got out of the news business pretty quickly.
[laughs] But anyway, when he was, when he was a child and he was doing this, you know, he made it finishable at the time when everyone was, you know, it was like, "You're done. You're caught up." Like, it's over.
Like, and that's like, I think that's smart. But anyway, that's my, that's my one product thing.
How do you think the, the sort of news product, I mean, but it like needs to change, and how are you, how are you thinking about that, right?
Because it's another one, just like going to a URL, it's hard for me to believe it is, is not gonna happen.
It's hard for me to believe that these articles on webpages are gonna be the default of how people get informed about what's going on in the world. Just seems unlikely. Yeah.
I think it's gonna evolve a tremendous amount. I mean, I think this is global across, across the news industry. It's already ha- it's already happening, right? A, a ton of people get their news from social media.
It looks nothing like articles, right? Right. It looks like people telling you things through videos or through posts and short snippets, and it's a very different model than what you're encountering on most publishers.
So we're, you know, we're embracing that. Like, we're, we're making our product much more mot- multimodal with, with video and audio.
We have a mixed media feed that we've just introduced that you can opt into on the homepage that's gonna be much more visual and much more, you know, just have a little bit more of a community layer where we highlight things like what people are talking about with different stories, let people share and react to things.
Still with sort of that trusted news at the core, but really try to get... If we wanna aggregate the internet, we have to aggregate more of the internet, right?
It's not just-Those sort of text stories in a traditional headline feed, but really thinking about how are people consuming information now, and how do we make that a much more multimedia experience?
So we're definitely thinking a lot about that. We've introduced a lot of those features in our app as well.
I think you're gonna continue to see that evolve throughout this year with more visual features, more social features, just letting publishers and creators become more active, you know, become more active in the platform versus just sort of a flat kind of syndication.
So I think it's an exciting space to be in.
I think while people are tr- reading traditional news less overall because they are shifting social or maybe they're having conversations with AI, there still continues to be this desire and need to know what's going on, to be informed, and also to be entertained by people that you know and trust, or institutions that you know and trust.
And so that's really at the heart of kind of what we're building is how do we open up to more of that through things like our creator program or working with publishers to bring in more of the content that they're creating for other formats, not just, you know, publishing on the website, but also the things that they're publishing on social.
How do we work with them to bring those things into our ecosystem as well? So we have a lot of plans for making the product much more dynamic in those ways throughout this year.
And so how do you, like, work with publishers and creators? I mean, I assume these things are going to... I hate the word creators, but, like, they- they're gonna merge, you know.
I mean, people make stuff, like, at the end of the day. I don't know what- Yeah... you know, and, and some are creators, some are publishers. I don't know what. Maybe if you're in the HR department, you're a publisher.
I don't know what, what the difference is. [laughs] But how do you, how do you end up thinking that? Because, look, the reality is there's a lot of...
a lot of the energy has shifted from institutional media to this, you know, more individual-led media, and, and a lot of the bad stories are, are on the institutional media side.
There's, there's a lot going on on the individual side that is doing really well and it's growing, and that is just the marketplace has shifted and people are gravitating to other places. I mean, this was...
You know, Will Lewis, maybe he's said it, you know, and, and not politically correct, but, like, he said, "Nobody's reading your stuff." And, like, it was...
And, and the analytics, and this is something Matt Murray had mentioned in his note again a little obliquely, but, like, the, the numbers are the numbers and a lot of the attention and focus has shifted away from institutional publishers.
Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's a, a lot of different threads in what you just said.
I, I think that one of the things that's most interesting about creators or independent journalists, I mean, you're in this zone as a, as an independent journalist, is that they know their audiences so well, and they are laser focused on serving those audiences and creating content that's incredibly relevant to them.
I think it takes a tremendous amount of discipline as a larger institution to do that with a tremendous amount of focus and to make the kind of deep connection.
So I think that's part of what, what has sort of fueled the rise of this independent journalism. And sort of in terms of how publishers and creators are different, I also see them...
The, the lines are increasingly blurred. I mean, internally, we're now just talking about it as contributors, right?
Contributors to the platform, whether they're small and independent, whether a five-person business, whether they're, whether they're a hundreds of person businesses, right?
There's similar needs across that whole stack of contributors, and what you wanna do is enable them to build a business, right? To- Mm-hmm...
to be able to build a business, to be able to connect with audiences, to be able to communicate with those audiences, right? All with a sense of quality and, and, and to be able to bring that wide range of perspectives.
So I think that, you know, the creator economy in, in my view, or the independent journalism economy is a really bright spot. Like, it's a... it's awesome to see so many people thrive.
I think it's gonna evolve in the future.
You know, there's an open question about how many independents can sustain independently, and will they need to kind of group up or bundle up more as time continues just due to how, you know- Yeah...
how sustainable is it to have a million independent subscriptions? But even so, the way it transforms the dynamics of the, the publishing ecosystem is really, I think, great for our access to information, right?
Because we're hearing from a lot more people, they're able to, they're able to write things that maybe they otherwise wouldn't have written, and maybe it offers a new model for how larger publishers think about- Mm-hmm...
incubating, incubating and supporting talent, and I think those organizations that have adapted to this way of incubating and supporting talent have done better, and that's one of the reasons why I'm really bullish- Sure...
about the programs that we're building at Yahoo in terms of bringing in those independent creators. So what are you doing with creators? Like, explain the Yahoo Creator program for everyone.
So we have a program where we let creators, you know, either recruit them or they apply into our program, trusted creators, we let them come into the, the platform, and then they are able to publish within the platform in a similar way as our other publishers.
So this, this contributor model, which is, you know, people, people are able to create content for the Yahoo network, either syndicate or create original content for our network.
And we've really been focused on growing that creator recruitment effort primarily across lifestyle topics to just fill out the, the content corpus. So what, what stories do we have access to?
What people do we have access to? And then empower those creators with a toolkit to connect with, with their audiences on Yahoo. That program is, is, you know, still pretty, pretty young for us.
We have about 200 creators on the platform, but it's growing a lot. Like, we have, you know, four times as much content, you know, being published now as we did about a year ago.
So we're growing it pretty fast, and we're gonna continue to invest in that this year, both in the toolkit for creators and the toolkit for publishers to, you know, manage, you know, actively manage and maintain community and audience on Yahoo.
And so it's, uh, it's been a really great, great addition to the publisher content that we have, and I'm excited to see the ways it continues to grow.Okay, so you'll help creators monetize. Mm-hmm. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Okay.
'Cause that's important. Yeah. I mean, there are monetization- So right now we have a rev share model that's similar to what we do with publishers.
We have, we have rev share and affiliate rev share models with creators, but certainly, you know, as we think about the future, looking at other ways to offer them support as they, you know, again, build, build business on the platform.
Right. I was, I was excited as someone who's, has followed Yahoo for a long time to see that Ya- Yahoo and search back together, you know, 'cause, I mean, obviously you've been- Yeah...
doing search for a long time, but, you know, Yahoo has a long history of search. I mean, I... And it's many sort of like near, near-death experiences, [chuckles] I think.
Like, you know, I, I was covering it when, like, Google was... You know, it... We went from a portal era to a search era and, you know, I, I guess we're, we're going into an AI era, maybe. It seems that way.
But this actually provides an opportunity for, for Yahoo. You came out with it, and this is separate from, from Yahoo Search, right? But to me it's all in this, the discovery w- with Yahoo Scout.
Explain what you're trying to accomplish there and, and why, w- why Yahoo's go- going back to this. Like, I mean, it would be easier, easy to sort of skip this. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think what's happening in the, the world is that there's a tremendous opportunity to help people, uh, to be useful to people with the tools that are available through generative AI, and I think Yahoo is in an amazing position to do that with the network of users that we have and the data that we have.
So we've just introduced a new product called Yahoo Scout.
Scout is an intelligence layer that goes across all of our platform that's powering features in mail, in search, in news, things like ca- key takeaways or our daily digest or email summaries and all that kind of stuff, right?
There's an intelligence layer component to Scout. Then there's our answers engine, which you can access at scout.yahoo.com, which is, you know, Yahoo's take on what generative search should be.
And, you know, you can, you can ask it any question and it'll, it'll produce an answer for you, and it's...
I think what I love about it is that it has a lot of, a lot of texture and a lot of connection to the web, right? It's not sort of a, a tight walled garden of text with tiny footnotes.
It's a really active product where, you know, we really try to bring the citations and the, and the links out and the data to the fore.
And I think this is a space where Yahoo shines because we have such a wealth of data from our users.
We have so much access to great content and a ton of experience, as you said, in search, and we can bring all that to bear- Yeah...
in building something that I think is much more accessible and friendly than a, than a lot of the other products that are out there right now. And is... I mean, do you see the data...
I mean, will this send more traffic to publishers? I mean, I, I saw some, a, a report recently that was done that AI overviews on Google's have led to 58% fewer clicks. And this is just confirming.
I mean, publishers- Mm-hmm. You know, Google was out there saying... I don't know, they were talking out- Yeah... out of both sides of their mouth, in my view. Because everyone...
It's like it's raining and they're telling us that it's not raining. It's like, [chuckles] come on. Like, it's raining. Like at the...
Every single publisher, not every publisher, but just about all publishers were seeing far less traffic, okay?
And then right after AI overviews, and it's pretty obvious using the product that people are gonna click less. And now it's, it's 58% less, so yeah, it was true. It was raining. Is this, this is... Is...
Do you see that this sends, like, traffic out to publishers?
'Cause I think, you know, the, the direction of travel seems to be that, at least with, you know, with Gemini and with ChatGPT, is that you simply don't have to click, click a lot. That is the...
That's embedded in the product. I mean, like I... So I don't understand.
Like, I mean, the entire product, as far as I understand in, in using them, it, one of the main benefits is that you don't have a bunch of links that you have to click and then hit the back button w- if you don't get what you want.
Yeah. I mean, I think with the way that the preexisting generative AI tools are built, it really is meant to keep you within- Yeah... their product itself.
And to your earlier point, it, it's completely intuitive that that would lead to impact on publisher, publisher traffic. I mean, that's a no-brainer.
Scout is designed differently, and it's too early to tell how much traffic it's gonna send down to stream to publishers, but if you use it, if you put it side by side with one of these other tools, you're gonna see immediately that it's different.
It has much bigger citations. It has read more links. It has, it has a, a, a much more visual approach to promoting publisher content.
And our hope is that we can create the right balance of offering that quick synthesis and context together with a pathway into publisher content. And I think that's...
I don't think that people wanna live their whole lives in a, in a wall of text.
I think that they wanna be able to access and explore the internet, and we believe, you know, in a sustainable open web and that there should continue to be vibrant content produced in a lot of different places.
And so I think this approach is really a, a great one for trying to give you, you know, give a user the benefit of some of that synthesis that they can get with these AI tools, but also create that doorway to a deeper, a deeper knowledge, and I think that also contributes to, like, building trust, right?
You're gonna put all your trust in the AI tool, or do you wanna- Mm-hmm... you wanna verify? You wanna go deeper, you wanna know where that information is coming from.
And I think users still have a strong pull toward that, towards knowing and being able to trust in what they're reading. Yeah. Do you...
I mean, you mentioned the open web, like, and I think there's a lot of questions about l- about the future of the open web, and I- I'm wondering, like when you look at, at, at AI broadly, like do you see this as a platform shift on, on, on par really with the move from analog to digital versus even desktop to mobile?
Like, I mean, that... It's... 'Cause I th- I think sometimes it can be hard because there's so much hyperventilating that comes from, from Silicon Valley.
Like, it's happening, the spaceship is over the, the White House, is what my fellow podcast [chuckles] host had told me a- [chuckles]... a while ago.
And-And I think it, it calls into question just the future of, of the open web because all of these forces and a lot of money and power seem to be lined up against it, at least as I define the open web. But what...
I mean, do you think that... Like, give me the case that there's... I guess I, I, I put multiple questions there. What, what is- Yeah...
like, what is your assessment of how big this shift is going to be with AI for, for publishers in particular? Massive. I think it's gonna be massive. I think it's gonna take some time to play out.
I think it's unclear where it leads.
I think that we all have to be really experimental and, you know, holding dear that the, the, the principles that we have, that content has value and trusted content matters- Mm-hmm...
and that original facts have to be brought into the world, and without some original facts and data being br- built into the world, generative AI can't do what it's intended to do, so that original piece has value.
But I think we have... we're gonna have to navigate a, a very tumultuous time figuring all this out, because I don't think, I don't think this, th- I, I don't think it's over-hyped.
I think we can all tell that from the way that we are interacting with the web and digital products today, where we're taking our questions, how we're getting our answers, you know, how memory in these products is fundamentally changing the way we build knowledge.
I think it's, it's, it's not going away, and it's gonna be really, really massive and momentous, and I think it's really about how we respond to that. Okay, so now the open web question, right?
Like, so first, what is your definition of the open web? I mean, because Yahoo was... You know, I remember when Yahoo was, like, the enemy of the, like, the open web in some ways 'cause it was portals versus the rest.
And, you know, the, the people who were not in the portals were always complaining about the portals getting all of the ad dollars. Those were simpler times. They're like, "They're only getting, like...
They're getting, like, two-thirds of the, the ad budgets." Like, oh, well, just wait, just wait to [laughs] see how this is gonna turn out. What, what is...
Like, what is the future of the open web, and how do you think about it? Because what you're describing with AI seems like an alternative to the open web.
I mean, I think of the open web as a place where co- you know, businesses can be buil- built and monetized- Mm-hmm...
outside of monoliths, and that there can be spaces where, from a user perspective, you can explore and discover and find things that are not simply fed to you by algorithms in a, in a, again, monolithic platform.
I think that we still are... The platforms do dominate so much of what we do today already.
I do think AI creates another, another layer of threat to that sort of open web because, you know, we're just gonna be easier to go to one place and get it all in there versus go to a bunch of different places.
But the question to me is how do you create, how do you create that vibrant ecosystem where you still have a lot of people able to create content and build businesses, and how do we build an economy that can support that?
It's hard to know what, it's hard to know what the future is gonna hold, but I would love...
You know, I hope and believe that in the future there's still gonna be a lot of ways to create value and get, get dollars back for that value. We just have to figure out how that looks. Yeah.
I mean, I think, I think about what's going on in the software business right now. I was seeing Sam Altman was saying, "Well, software companies are probably just gonna be API companies," right?
And I w- I wonder about a lot of publishing, like whether... In this line of thinking, and these are the people who are building the systems, and they have all the money- Mm-hmm...
and they have the compute, so it matters what they say, is that whether publishers stop...
I- in, in some cases, like, they're, they're becoming API companies versus they're, they're running the, all their systems themselves, right?
Like I, I sometimes wonder about that because they've outsourced a lot of functions of the publishing by, by necessity, you know? And so I wonder, does this end up leading to l- to publishers saying, "We are mostly...
Our... Most of our business is going to be as, like, trusted information suppliers"?
Yeah, I can definitely imagine a future where there's a lot more emphasis on the production of the information and sale of that information versus how it's presented, how it's presented to users.
And by presentation, I mean all the web infrastructure that, web or app infrastructure that produces it to a, to a consumer.
I, I think that certainly is, is a possibility, and that's what gives you the ability to laser focus on the audience and what are their information needs. Yeah. I think that's also why at Yahoo we're really focused...
You know, it's like building this contributor platform.
Like, what's a toolkit that, that you can use to build and create this value that you don't have to, you know, maintain all the technology of when the, when the overhead of maintaining that technology becomes, you know, becomes an obstacle to doing where y- doing the thing that you're really doing- Yeah...
to produce the value, which is producing the content. Yeah. I mean, you were, you were at the Post when, when people wanted to sell their CMSes, right? Like, I mean, like, there was a lot of publishers...
I mean, New York Magazine was out there, Clay. I'm like the only person who remembers this outside of [laughs] anyone at New York Magazine then. I mean, they were trying to, you know, sell their, their...
license their CMS, and they were- Yeah... gonna be technology companies.
And I can definitely see this developing, where a lot of publishers really do just focus on, on producing really great differentiated content and, and hopefully data products [laughs] and are able to then have, you know, li- ah, big licensing businesses.
Mm-hmm. I don't know if a lot will... Like, I think of a... Look, there's a lot of SEO-driven publishers that are in a really difficult spot, and I think that's, that's reality. I mean, that...
They were supplyingThey were kind of suppliers anyway, right? The business model- Mm-hmm... was just, you know, indirect. But yeah, and I, I wonder whether publish...
how much publishers are going to build, and that's what I see at, at publishers is they don't know what to build right now. That, that would be [laughs] what I observe. Yeah, I think that's true.
And I think it's essential for all publishers to figure out what are they offering that's unique. Is that the content, or is that something in the product?
And if it's a product, what, what is their advantage in building it faster and better than a tech company could? And how do they prevent it beco- from becoming abstractable?
Because if it's abstractable, then why isn't it just content that they're feeding through some API to some other, other place, right?
So I think there's a, there's a lot of questions for publishers right now, but the fundamental unit of most publishing companies is, is content and original IP.
And if we can figure out for them how to, how to lean into that and then reduce the overhead of all the other stuff that's not necessarily adding value, you know, moving pixels around on an article page or a homepage or something like that, right?
Then I think that could be a good thing, maybe less distracting for publishers in the long run. But, you know, it's gonna take some time to figure out how to get there.
Yeah, so final thing is like, when you're looking out three years, what does this ecosystem look like? Well, nobody knows what the future holds. It's hard to know. I used to do five years, but like now I'm down to three.
[laughs] It's hard to know what the future holds. I'll go into 18 months next. The change is gonna dramatically accelerate.
I mean, to the point you're making about just like what AI engineering en- enables, the way that it's changing product development engineering is just amazing, right?
Just the rise of Cloud Code over the past few months, this has been in- incredible to watch.
So there's gonna s- to be a massive velocity shift, and I think that's gonna, it's gonna force, you know, force more rapid decision-making about what are the content products that have value from a publisher ecosystem standpoint.
And so, you know, h- how we are just thinking about how to support that, how to support that transition, how to be on the front edge of figuring out how to, how to partner and, and how to provide monetization in that environment, et cetera.
But I think it's gonna be more, you know, it's gonna be more AI, it's gonna be more visual, it's gonna be more social even than it is today, and that we're gonna be having to move even faster than we are today by a, by a huge margin.
Hmm. Do you think publishers will have websites for humans or just for bots? I think they'll still have websites for humans for, for a long time. I mean, it's like the newspaper.
People are like, "Oh, newspaper's going away." No, newspaper's still here. It's just different, right? Yeah, not everywhere. It's more of a boutique product. Not in Atlanta.
[laughs] It serves a purpose, but it's a more boutique product. But it's in a lot of places, and some places are starting, starting to produce print editions, even if they're quarterly or whatever. No, I got you.
It's more of as prestige products, but- Yeah, yeah. You know, I think in three years, you know, from a Yahoo perspective, the role of guide is gonna be even more important.
So with like products like Scout or, you know, Yahoo Home and the products that we're introducing, it's like, how do we help you get oriented? How do we be the place you start that journey?
How do we help you find the good stuff when it's increasingly sort of mashed into a nameless, faceless thing, right?
How do we continue to support that vibrant economy of discovering different things and, and feeding that urge to, to, to explore and be curious? And so I think that role of guide is gonna continue to be essential. Cool.
Well, Kat, I really appreciate you taking the time. It was great to chat. Great to chat with you, Brian. Thanks for having me. [outro music]