That's, that's just your big question right now.

So, you know, like in, in way back in the day, my company, we were the first ones to switch from Overture to Google AdWords.

Like, I go way back in, in the search category, and I'm very passionate that, uh, that search advertising does need to cross the chasm to AI search, and that while it won't be one-for-one efficient, meaning, you know, keyword targeted link, blue links that look just like the editorial links were a great business model for, you know, 25 years now.

Um, it will look a little bit different, and it probably will be somewhat less efficient in this new UI, but I think actually the characteristics of the two are actually more similar than people would think, and there's a little work that needs to be done to, to bring them over and how you're gonna match keywords and how you're gonna render it.

But I actually think, you know, this new environment will be more similar to, to traditional search than people think in, in that way.

Um, with Yahoo's Scout, we actually, one of the core values of the product has been that we're getting out...

Sorry, forgetting [chuckles] very Italian with how I'm talking.

And you realize from like selling AOL, like how much have you do the math, I guess, for sort of the Apollo deal to, to now?

Why are you still so invested there? Is that growing? Are you just holding serve? And then how do you think about, well, we should just do casino?

So the entire company we inherited was monetized through this group that was a three-headed monster of native advertising, a supply side platform, and a demand side platform.

You had to buy all three, and the Yahoo consumer businesses had to only get its revenue from that group.

So if you think about the SSP, we had, you know, [chuckles] it was the Yahoo SSP.

We couldn't go out and play the field on an auction from Trade Desk and from Google and, and from others.

So that was part of the decision there, is we were leaving a lot of money on the table on our own consumer properties.

The native ad business was just declining over time and something that was taking up a lot of resources.

How do you avoid the cliff? 'Cause it, it feels like it ri- it rhymes with the past, as you're pointing out.

What to you is the differentiating factor here with Scout as you compare it to all the other chatbots that are built from search engines?

Well, first I'd say there aren't very many.

So I'd say just by entering the category.

The big ones, the big ones.

Yeah, yeah.

The big ones.

I agree.

What is your perspective on introducing ads in Scout, in chatbots? Is that going to be a significant part of your business?

Mm-hmm.

Um, it is conversational, the way an AI, an AI search engine would be and a, and a chatbot would be, but, um, but a little more straightforward.

It's not kind of getting to your inner feelings [chuckles] and having that kind of a conversation.

It is conversational, um, but the format is, besides being very Yahoo!, f- uh, with a friendly personality-

Yeah

...

in how we lay things out, and I'd say just very different that way.

Um, it is also, um, you know, really dipping into all of our unique data to bring in just very original answers.

Mm-hmm

... uh, when Apollo saw it and they called me probably nine months before they, uh, closed the deal, five months before they signed the deal, so the beginning of 2021, you know, I'd done a few of these internet, consumer internet turnarounds before, um, so I think that's how they found their way to me.

And it had all the, the great bones of what a great internet turnaround, you know, could be, which is a lot of traffic, a company that's seen better days, a team that had been through the wringer [laughs], uh, you know, had been inside of a telecom company for the previous five years.

It had been, you know, a struggling public company for many years before that through a lot of sea change in the industry.

And we can talk about how that wound up there.

I had to do the forensics on that myself.

Um, but, uh, but, you know, the hardest thing to get in this industry is, is that level of distribution.

Yeah.

Um, but I, I'm wondering about, you know, from a, a non-journalist perspective, how do you kind of view the media industry at Yahoo, um, and just in general, how are you looking at what's next for, for your journalists?

Yeah.

Well, part of what we figured out when we got here was, was again, you do the forensics on the company, what makes it successful.

The history of why Yahoo even got into media at all was not by, um, being, um, investigative journalists or, or on the enterprising side of news, but by being, uh, the first and best aggregator of news and being a partner, um, to people like Fortune, by sending them traffic, sharing the revenue.

It's funny to see AI companies now trying to ink those deals.

We have thousands of those deals that go back 20 plus years, uh, with the, with companies.

We still operate that way today.

Mm-hmm.