The great business comeback trope almost always fails to acknowledge the hard work, missteps and sometimes decades of persistence required to simply keep operating. For Yahoo’s UK country manager, Steve Mchenry, the term isn’t even applicable to the one-time biggest internet services company in the world. Yahoo may have lost its crown to Google, but it never really lost its brand equity.

The pioneer company had a seemingly unbreakable monopoly as it quickly became the portal of choice to the world wide web for a whole generation in the noughties. “We grew very quickly at the start, and I think people forget the audience we had along the way, that grew up with us are still there,” says Mchenry.

And after years taking a back seat to a new generation of Big Tech, the company is seeing something of a renaissance. Yahoo Mail had 225 million active users in 2024, with Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance some of the most visited online media outlets. “In the UK alone, seven out of ten people use a Yahoo product. Only six in ten votes in a general election. Now, as always, we have ludicrous scale,” adds Mchenry.

Humble beginnings to the OG of the internet

Yahoo was founded in California in 1994 by students Jerry Yang and David Filo, the prototype ‘two guys in a garage’ who went on to change the world. Starting as a small directory to navigate users around the new world wide web, by 2000 the business had grown to a value of $128bn.

From there, the company famously passed on the opportunity to buy Google for $1m in 1998, the beginning of the end for Yahoo as it was quickly outrun by an upstart generation of internet companies. Today, as the tide turns on Big Tech which once claimed to ‘do no evil’, Yahoo remains untainted by the backlash. “We are the good internet,” claims Mchenry. When pressed for examples he says that everything that Yahoo creates, that partners on its site, are what Mchenry considers “premium journalism”.

As Yahoo turns 30 years old, with its adolescent mistakes in the rear view, it faces yet another transition which brings a window of opportunity to capture the AI driven internet services market. While Yahoo’s revenue streams are multifaceted and include advertising, search, and other digital services, AI driven AdTech is at the forefront of its growth efforts and represents the company’s biggest opportunity going forward. “So not only can we be a media powerhouse, but we have AI and ad tech delivering results for advertisers,” he says.

Groundwork for the company’s transformation began, in earnest, with the appointment of CEO Jim Lanzone in 2021, coinciding with Yahoo’s acquisition by Apollo Asset management. After years of unsuccessful management shifts, the combination of Lanzone at the helm alongside an asset manager with a track record, appears to have put Yahoo back in the running.

“We’re really trying to focus on where we can win. We’ve gone for our media offering and our DSP (digital services platform). So, it’s an interesting point in the history of Yahoo, people don’t quite realise the last three, four years under Jim as CEO, the amount of transformation we’ve had,” says Mchenry. Yahoo DSP is a centralised platform for its advertising clients to create, manage and monitor their campaigns.

In 2023, the company first integrated its AI solution Yahoo Blueprint within Yahoo DSP. And in June 2024 it unveiled the latest update to its AI engine Yahoo Blueprint Performance.

“Blueprint sits at the heart of our DSP. Obviously, a lot of platforms offer AI driven optimisation, but ours offers a really holistic approach. We don’t just focus on individual campaigns. With AI, we leverage a campaign across the entire life cycle from planning a campaign to forecasting, optimising while it’s running, and then to the budget allocation.

“In advertising layman terms, it allows for efficiency performance gains that push the edge of what brands can get and it’s integrated across all our media channels and continues to evolve,” says Mchenry.

While Blueprint is very much an opt in service, Mchenry estimates that nearly 70% of all eligible spend is actually adopting it. Processing ten times more data, with 90% faster response times than before, the proposition offers significant savings for customers.

“The idea behind it is really that it’ll get your media budget to work a lot harder. That’s our big play because performance is all anyone’s talking about at the moment. We believe, that with Blueprint, with the 30 years of learning, with the algorithms we’ve got, that it’s a game changer for brands,” he says.

The company’s AI strategy saw it acquire AI-driven news platform, Artifact, in June 2024, a company founded by Instagram’s Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. More personalised news, as well as a fully AI integrated Yahoo.com homepage bolster are all part of a wider strategy to share AI driven content across all channels.

“It’s a very consistent story, whereas we’ve gone through eras where we’ve purchased a lot of businesses, decisions that may confuse the story somewhat. Right now, everything we do is to drive two outcomes, improve our Yahoo ad offerings, to strengthen our home page, Yahoo Finance, our email products, or strengthen our DSP,” says Mchenry.

Mchenry – or Macca as he is affectionately known within industry circles – has earned his stripes within the world of digital services, having been a part of Walt Disney’s launch of DisneyMedia+ in the UK and digital sales at Virgin Media. In August, when he leaves Yahoo after 12 years to join Sky Media as commercial chief, he will leave with a unique vantage point to a company in transition.

“Feedback from market is about a renaissance of Yahoo, and it just needs to keep on telling its story,” Mchenry explains. The business of social media and internet services is heavily based on narrative, and Yahoo’s story continues to evolve bringing a new generation on board, as well as serving its existing user base. After all, everyone loves a comeback story.