Yahoo News has about 180 million unique visitors every month. That number is fueled by a number of habit-driven features that see users coming back day after day — to check their email, get financial info, hear the latest in sports (especially fantasy), and crush a new daily game. It’s consistently one of the most popular news sites in the country. In 2025, only CNN and Fox News had more users visit at least three times a week, according to the 2025 Digital News Report.
Yahoo executives recently gave separate podcast interviews about the state of the company: Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on Decoder and Kat Downs Mulder, general manager of Yahoo News, on Newsroom Robots.
Once “left for dead” and described as both “a relic and running joke,” the O.G. internet company has been on a mission to revitalize its business — and the Yahoo brand. Lanzone, for one, said he’s hoping for “a New Balance type comeback” for the purple logo.
Here are a few other things that stood out.
Yahoo is a “very profitable” company.
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.”
Gen Z is using Yahoo Mail. (Really!)
If you associate Yahoo Mail with Boomers, you are not alone. My lovely mother-in-law sends email from a @yahoo.com address, but few friends and peers are using the service. In his interview, however, Lanzone claims Yahoo Mail is popular and even “growing” among the digital native generations.
“It’s pretty incredible that with all it’s been through and what you might assume about it, 50% of Yahoo Mail users are Gen Z or millennial,” Lanzone said. “Nobody would assume that.”
Yahoo says it’s “not the place to go for breaking news.”
Lanzone says plainly that Yahoo “is not the place to go for breaking news.” It recently sold off the tech news sites Engadget and TechCrunch and has moved away from traditional reporting roles. Lanzone candidly describes Yahoo as an aggregator — rather than producer — of news.
“When I got here, we had a White House correspondent,” Lanzone said. “We were competing with the Associated Press, and that is what we really wanted to get out of.”
So…what does Yahoo do? Lanzone explained Yahoo’s raison d’être to Patel:
But that goes all the way back to, “Why are we still here after all these years? What’s our right to exist? What’s our right to win?” And really the long story short of that goes back to the original mission of the company: being the trusted guide to the internet. In 1995, that meant helping you find websites. In 2026, it can mean all kinds of different things. But that’s where we’re strong. That’s where we’re still strong after all the things the company went through over the years.
One of those ways it’s being a guide? Yahoo made waves when it purchased the news discovery app Artifact — which had built a highly devoted (if relatively tiny) user base in a little over a year of existence — and did something unusual.
“Usually, when you make an acquisition like that, you munge them into the Borg, to the mothership,” Lanzone said. “We did the opposite. We actually just put the Yahoo logo on the Artifact app and started from there and just admitted it.”
In her interview with Nikita Roy, Downs Mulder says that Yahoo “dramatically” increased the number of users for its app after making the switch.
Yahoo believes sending traffic to publishers is “a differentiator.”
In addition to the rebranded Artifact app, the new AI-powered search engine Yahoo Scout is another of those ways Yahoo seeks to act as guide to the internet.Yahoo Scout lives as a standalone news product but is also integrated into Yahoo’s popular sports and finance verticals.
Lanzone says Yahoo has “bent over backwards to try to send more traffic downstream to the people who created the content that was digested by the LLMs to create the answers” given by Scout.
“We could be just being Pollyanna about it or think it’s a differentiator or whatever,” he said of Scout linking directly to news sources rather than attempting to keep users in Yahoo’s own walled garden. “But first of all, we think people want to go downstream to the publishers. Second, we think actually being able to check the sources or follow up and go get more information is an extremely high user need. It’s core to the user need in search, which is really where we are playing.”
In her interview, Downs Mulder — a veteran of newsrooms, including The Washington Post — says “the publisher dynamic is really critical to get right” for Yahoo. For Scout, Yahoo is working with Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace, but Downs Mulder acknowledged “we have a lot of work to do in the future to figure out what those compensation models and economics look like.”
“It’s clear that the dynamics of search are changing. It’s clear that the user expectation for what they’re going to get when they’re searching is changing,” she added. “And so it’s essential that we all adapt to that while trying to continue to respect the origin of that information and reward those information creators.”
