How Yahoo built AI-driven content discovery into its revamped news app
In April 2024, Yahoo acquired Artifact, a tool that uses AI to recommend news to readers. Yahoo folded Artifact's—which was cofounded by Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom—into its revamped news app to help surface and curate content for readers.
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about the acquisition, the company's approach to news curation, and what the future could hold for the private equity-owned company.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Artifact had come up as a startup founded by the Instagram cofounders. It used AI and advanced algorithms to pull in really great content and also do a great job of surfacing it. When we read that they were going to shut it down, I reached out to Kevin Systrom immediately to say we should talk about acquiring it. We basically took the backbone of the Artifact app and made it the Yahoo News app.
We look to acquire companies if they can fill a gap for us. We're not in the game of acquihires. It has to be a product fit. We're the No. 1 news publication in the U.S. in terms of total traffic. We got to that point by being an aggregator. We're aggregating thousands of sources and then using algorithms to surface the right ones for each of our millions of users.
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