Last week Yahoo hired a new chief marketing officer. Josh Line, formerly chief brand guy at Paramount Global, faces one of the toughest gigs imaginable.

The job is to take what is effectively a living fossil and invigorate it. Line must transform Yahoo – a brand synonymous with missed opportunity and decline – into something new and vibrant. He must do that in an environment where even the companies that buried Yahoo two decades ago – Google and Meta – are existentially challenged.

So does Line look back to go forwards? Exactly how much is the right amount of nostalgia? What is the product proposition in a world flooded by AI slop and dominated by the promise of AI agents?

Yahoo CMO Josh Line

The mad fact is that Yahoo is still one of the biggest sites on the internet. The company founded in 1994 as a hand-curated web directory has an annual turnover in the billions and employs thousands of people.

The even madder fact is that Yahoo’s single biggest demographic is 25-34 year olds (according to Similarweb data). In Australia, where Yahoo was never the dominant force it has been in the US, the local version of the portal gets 5-6m visits a month from an older audience (biggest demo is over-50s). This size places it in the zone of a minor news site like theheraldsun.com.au.

But in the US, Yahoo registers three billion monthly visits (again, Similarweb) from just under 250 million people (Comscore), which for December 2024 makes it the second-most popular web property after Google.

Yahoo’s core functionality is email, news and finance. It doesn’t do social networking. It doesn’t do messaging anymore. Its........

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