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Sourcery · 3 min · Oct 19, 2026

Yahoo cut ad tech costs and unlocked better ad yield

Jim Lanzone

CEO, Yahoo

Leads Yahoo since 2021, running its turnaround under Apollo; previously CEO of Tinder and CBS Interactive.

  • Molly O'SheaHost · Founder, Sourcery

    Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.

About this segment

Yahoo inherited a money-losing ad stack that also forced its sites to favor internal ads. Shutting and selling parts cut costs and let Yahoo optimize yield independently.

From “Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal”, Oct 19, 2026. Watch the full episode

“it lost a lot of money. So operating those things was massive, and it was hundreds of millions of dollars a year out the door”
Jim Lanzoneat 17:59 · Sourcery17:59

Takeaways

  1. The ad tech business was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
  2. Internal ad tools prevented Yahoo from optimizing for the highest yield.
  3. Yahoo sold its native ad business to Taboola for a 25% stake.
Watch 2:52 from 16:57

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 16:57Yahoo cut ad tech costs and unlocked better ad yield2:52

  2. 30:18Yahoo Scout grounds answers in its own data3:32Up next
  3. 9:26Yahoo gave each brand its own entrepreneurial GM3:07
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 17:03

    and number one or number two or number three in all these different categories. You did mention that you guys divested a couple things. You divested some pretty notable assets, whether it was AOL, TechCrunch, a handful of others. So what were the ones that you divested and what were the decisions behind that? Yeah, so look, AOL was the biggest. We could talk about that. The first one was Edgecast, which was a content delivery network competing with people like Akamai that, you know, we just viewed that we didn't have a right to operate.

  2. 17:34

    The second and probably the biggest transformation job that we had to do until now where we're having to transform the whole company with, you know, around AI was the ad tech business. So AOL and Yahoo had each purchased 30-plus ad tech companies over the years. What we inherited was a three-legged stool of a SSP, DSP, and native platform that had a couple of issues. One was it lost a lot of money.

  3. 18:05

    So operating those things was massive, and it was hundreds of millions of dollars a year out the door that we had to fix. The second is that it was to help make that successful, it was the primary source of revenue for Yahoo. So instead of being able to play the field with our supply side platform and being able to pull yield levers and taking all comers onto that and optimizing for the highest yield, we were only taking ads from the ad tech business. So offloading that actually did two things. One is we, you know, we sent money, we shut down money losing businesses or sold them. And the second is that we were able to now truly optimize revenue on Yahoo proper. So it was two things.

  4. 18:51

    As part of that in February, 2023, we actually had to let go of over 2000 people. Part of that was because we didn't want to sell the SSP. A lot of people wanted it, but we didn't want to give anyone preferential treatment the way we had been doing on our pages. We wanted to be able to yield to optimize so we had to shut that down we sold the native business to tabula uh and took 25 percent of their company uh so that that was those two and then uh while we did offload more things like you mentioned tech crunch was one aol we just did in october of last year um you know was uh uh you know was um was focusing on the dsp so actually there it wasn't just offloading things or is actually the decision of, oh, there's a crown jewel in here and we can actually invest in that thing.

  5. 19:38

    So a lot goes into all that. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on.