Far From Dead, Yahoo Is Attracting Gen Z

There is something to be said about the lasting endurance of Yahoo. We do not think about the company much anymore, and yet it can proudly proclaim to be one of the last tech pioneers of the ’90s dotcom boom that has actually managed to stick around. Even more incredibly, Yahoo remains one of the largest websites in the U.S. by traffic, according to Comscore, consistently ranked alongside the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Now the company is reminding everyone it is still alive—and that it is fine with having more modest ambitions than the tech giants that have come since.

Mark Zuckerberg is all in on augmented reality glasses and filling Facebook with AI-generated slop content; Apple’s iOS 18 is revamping the OS with AI that is frustrating users more than anything; X wants to become the WeChat of America while Elon Musk simultaneously turns the platform into his right-wing megaphone.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is sticking to its roots: It wants to be a place where users go to catch up on news, check on stock prices and sports scores, and look at their emails. No fighting with neo-Nazis, or convincing your grandma that a picture of a giant challah horse is fake. Yahoo can be a useful information portal, with a little AI sprinkled in. It does not need to dominate the future of AI, or have a metaverse play.

Business Insider published a nice story recently looking at how Yahoo is standing out from the rest in a time of major upheaval in the tech sector. It includes some interesting details, such as the fact that 45% of visitors to Yahoo in the U.S. are in the Millennial and Gen Z demographics. The company also ranks as the top news and media destination in the U.S. according to Similarweb.

Here’s an excerpt:

People in their 30s and up feel “nostalgia for this internet that didn’t have all this heaviness” and where more anonymous interactions dominated over virality and cancel culture, she adds. With its campaign, Yahoo is also reaching younger people and “selling the idea of what the internet was to people who cannot grasp the idea of what actually existed,” Brennan says. As people are increasingly interested in setting boundaries around their social media and screen time, Yahoo is playing up the good old days

To be sure, Yahoo is incorporating some AI into its products, but it appears to be in light-touch ways, such as by using AI to recommend news articles:

While everyone is doubling down on building their own AI, Yahoo’s approach is different. Its tools are built on large language models from OpenAI and Google, as well as other open-source LLMs, Sanchez tells me, while Google, Meta, and even Musk’s xAI are building LLMs. The idea is to “supercharge” Yahoo’s functions, he says, by using AI to summarize sporting events or organize unwieldy inboxes.

It is refreshing to see a tech company that is not trying to be more than what it is. Yahoo started out as a portal where early internet users could go to find everything they needed, from news to email and weather. That lead eroded over time as Google made it easier to find information across the web rather than going to relying on one website for everything, but Yahoo still sees hundreds of millions of monthly visitors. It tried under CEO Marissa Mayer to become “cool” with rebrands and yes, AI, but ultimately that all failed to make a dent against the likes of Google and Yahoo went back to its roots.

Akin to Craigslist, Yahoo still serves a purpose for many people and is fine doing that well and not trying to be more than what it is. Some might say stasis is a “decel” view, and progress is the only way to move humanity forward. But it is nice that some products do not completely diverge from their original purpose chasing new trends.

Yahoo’s survival also speaks to how tech platforms can be incredibly hard to kill once they find critical mass. Through a multitude of ownership changes and management chaos, Yahoo has managed to stick around, perhaps because so many people have it set as the default homepage on their computers, or simply out of pure habit. Yahoo’s costs have been cut to the bone over the past decade, but the traffic has remained high. You really have to screw things up royally to kill a site like Yahoo.

The company is also leaning on nostalgia to try and appeal to visitors—some webpages on Yahoo load with an oversized cursor that looks like those from early web browsers—though nostalgia plays usually are not enough to keep people around. We would welcome the return of Yahoo Avatars, however.