Gadgetory

hey guys it's Casey with the verge here at CES so a couple years ago Adam Cahan joined Yahoo when Yahoo bought his company into now and when Marissa Meyer became CEO she put him in charge of all of the company's mobile products this week at CES Yahoo and now some really interesting things that they plan on doing with their mobile products this year we sat down with Adam to find out exactly what they've got planned you've had a big 2013 breakneck pace you updated almost your entire product lineup can you sort of frame that for us what were all these redesigns about yeah so I'll I'll probably answer it mostly from the mobile perspective because that's really where I spend most of my time you know I kind of frame it in a way of saying it's like starting a revolution or what you need to start a revolution is first you need people you need exceptional talent and you know one of the things that we talked about was when we started in 2013 and my team in particular was basically created in November of 2012 and we asked the question of how many people at Yahoo were doing mobile and the answer was somewhere between 30 and 50 people and that was a big kind of aha moment where we're like wow you know if we're really gonna be a mobile first company and we're gonna be exceptional it's probably not going to be just 50 people so that started the kind of revolution and what we did is a tremendous amount of acquisitions a lot of them talent based to bring in extraordinary folks some of them technology-based what happens when you start bringing all those people together is you really are focused on building products and building products means bringing together designers product folks engineers to really craft and create something and what we basically set out to do was reimagine pretty much every experience we asked ourselves simple questions why do I need another weather app the answer for us was well actually why as a user am i reading charts and data when I really wanted to see the weather and that kind of started that process so we went through that type of experience with each one of our products the results of that Casey is now starting to show 2013 like you said we pretty much reimagined every single experience at Yahoo just a few that we're still working on and from mobile when I started we reached 100 50 million monthly users we now and Marissa shared an on-stage we now reach over 400 million monthly that's just extraordinary growth I mean we added over a hundred million in the last eight months alone I I'd love to say that's purely because of the products that we're creating a lot of that is you know just the general consumer shift but that was the result of basically focusing and working on that what that ultimately leads to in the final step of the revolution is the monetization right so when you have the scale of users you really start to focus on what can we do from a monetization perspective I think the biggest thing for us in 2013 was a recognition of what happens with a platform shift when a platform shift starts the first question that people usually start with is cannibalization they say things like well isn't mobile gonna cannibalize desktop I always find those conversations incredibly bizarre because I one I can't actually actually technically understand how something eats something else but that's okay but the answer is clearly no in fact what we found this year and are seeing more broadly as a system is that mobile is additive people are actually finding more time in the day so this year there was a Pew report that announced that for the first time ever American consumers would do more during their day than watch TV that was the number one dominant thing that that we used to do now actually if you combine mobile and Internet the time spent there is actually more than on TV for the first time ever so we found new time in the day the second thing that people ask is well wow these tiny screens you know big display ads what happens how do we you know we're gonna go from dollars to dimes and the answer there is definitively no actually these devices are immersive personalized more focus of the users attention and when you get the ad formats right they monetize better so what we saw this year was really the birth of native advertisement at scale really experiences that took ads and made them feel like they were part of that consumer product so these are things like we launched with image ads stream we've got more and more these formats coming out as an industry this was a very big year and I'll actually give credit to folks like Facebook and others frankly for showing the way I think what Facebook pulled off in q3 kind of going from zero to really 40 plus percent of their revenue in mobile what they did was the sort of quadruple backflip of the industry where all of us got to look and say okay so that's how it's done and I think you know at Yahoo we have our own twist on it and our product experiences are pretty unique but for example what you saw with David on stage with tumblr is a really a progressive understanding of what advertisement can be and so when you forecast for 2014 how are you feeling about monetizing these apps you've been building I think 2014 is gonna be a crossover year if you saw the math and Marissa showed on stage 800 million so this is exclusive of tumblr just Yahoo proper eight hundred million monthly users at Yahoo four hundred million mobile users we're at that like perfect 50/50 right now pageviews not the same actually more page views on desktop currently than mobile we will cross this year so I suspect that at some point towards the latter half of this year we will see more engagement more page views more users on mobile then we will even on desktop that's an extraordinary statement right to cross over at that scale alright let's talk about some of the product stuff so one of the most interesting things you guys announced today was that you've acquired a v8 which makes a kind of home screen replacement for Android what are you gonna do with these guys so I think well one the team is spectacular and really enjoy getting to know them through this process and seeing how they think about stuff I mean one of the things that you're really looking for when you're buying a product a technology something that we're excited about is how people are thinking about that the team the core team where do they want to go how do we fit with that and accelerate what they're doing a v8 is really spot-on for where we see search in a previous incarnation what most of us understood a search was we would type into a box and anticipatory computing and that context was search suggests type a few characters ooh did you mean this did you mean that starting to anticipate what a user was doing what these guys are doing is saying why do I even need the text in fact I have all the signals and all the clues that I need from the context of your device so we view that as a natural extension of where we were going we think a lot at Yahoo about search is a core part of our business and and when we thought about it in the mobile context it really was about hey how do we get these kinds of systems what I love about what they're doing is they really bring together the spirit of an ecosystem it's a system right it's really all of the applications it's a way of thinking about the user and saying gee what's the world class you know local application for when I'm in a new city what do I actually look for what are those kinds of things and I just I think their approaches where this is going right how do you make it valuable to Yahoo outside of Android right because other platforms aren't going to give you that same level of access that they enjoy there it's interesting so a couple of things one is so Android is obviously the right place to begin and like you said I mean for us it's mostly an affordance of the different kinds of api's and and things that we can do in that platform and how that starts to extend for example in iOS or others is in thinking about systems thinking about system design you know we started 2012-2013 with a lot of thinking about applications and thinking about how as a user we wanted to bring value to you if you use more than one Yahoo application if I had news and mail how do those two work together if I had news mail in sports how do those work together so that really started us down this path of system design so I think the applications can be the same way so the example that I use is you know in Android you can customize your entire home screen and that experience in iOS I can still customize once I'm inside an application what are some of those sidebar experiences what are some of the things that we surface for our users I think that's the same kind of dimension and it's somewhere it exists a little bit between the notification world which is really push and search which is really pull there's somewhere in between there that I think we can bring users value interesting let's talk about the other big thing that you announced today which is this app Yahoo News digest which I've been playing around with now for a day or so and I've I love it I mean I think its interested in a design perspective but what fascinates me is that at a time when just about everybody else is building an endless stream and Yahoo has built its its fair share of endless streams you've introduced an app that says you know we're gonna give you like 10 things and then you're done yeah talk to me about like kind of what what brought you guys to that place yeah so a lot of the inspiration came from Nick you know Nick is a pretty exceptional guy and really spends a lot of time thinking about sort of what experiences are right and native to him and what we found was all of us loved the stream and that sense of endless really comes from our ability frankly to parse information super fast what the stream often doesn't give you is that sense of completion right did I actually find out what was important today I don't know right I looked at a lot of stuff hopefully I got what was important but I don't actually know and we started to really riff on that a lot and say well you know what what would you need to feel complete and where was the right metaphor for us around that and it really came in the sense of frankly a metaphor from newspapers morning and evening digests why were they there they were there to kind of summarize stuff for you where Nick took that even one level further which i think is the right instinct is he took summarization technology in his first iteration and said what if I take an article and kind of distill it down to those things that are important what this is saying is if I crawl the web and I look at all of the different documents out there I can identify what's important document clustering hey how come there's 10 articles on this topic and if I distill the elements between all of those different articles I can come up with a perspective that says this is the you really need to know and what I've found in my own use is literally flipping through this thing in a minute I actually feel like I know what's going on so the weird part for us is in fact we almost have the opposite metric of a typical stream it's how little time can I get you to spend in the application how can I get you informed in the minimum amount of time possible so we actually are like the anti engagement application do you think that's particular to news or is there any way like that that idea could trickle into other products so my hope and I think you know we we take it with the grain of we're still learning and trying to understand my hope is that actually this becomes a templating format for all of our publications you know for me one of the things that I that I've observed and is a lot of the news presentation or information presentation generally on the web takes its cues from basic HTML and it's you know it's a page layout and it's pretty simple and actually if you take the metaphor of magazines and what we actually experienced when we you know look at some of those things the layouts are pretty complex right sometimes they're offset they have titling they have all kinds of layouts I believe that what those atoms so those elements right the distillation of saying this is the key quote this is the chart this is the map that if we're thoughtful about those we could actually get a tremendous amount of page experiences that would look really unique for us so I I think it goes beyond news and information I think that's the natural starting point right one of the most interesting things that you guys talked about on stage today was as you sort of kind of refined the public's idea of what Yahoo is all about you are going to focus on kind of four core experiences that are powered by Tumblr and Flickr and that's the first time I've heard Yahoo speak about those two things as engines talk to me about how that fits into your world become on the mobile side what are what are tumbling Flickr gonna power inside of Yahoo absolutely so what's amazing about those two products in particular is that they're really platforms tumblr probably the largest sort of blogging platform out there it's like our certainly one of the largest photo sites out there when you harness user-generated content you just get huge amounts of scale and those products and experiences will really build as platforms because they're really about users contributing sharing outdoing all of that kind of behavior there isn't anything endemic that's there and created for them so we think of Yahoo as being powered by those experiences just like our users use those platforms to do their own publishing and creation there really frankly creative tools what's unique is tumbler has the opportunity to power a lot of the digital magazine efforts so kind of the next chairman of of what we're talking about with media as a publishing platform also as a way frankly of getting terrific content I mean you can go deep where you go as deep as you want a tumbler in in lots of verticals there so I think that's one Flickr the imagery there is just inspiring I mean for us being on the creative side of thinking about products every time we go into the Flickr community and harness that we just come up with exceptional stuff and this is where weather came from the new postcards mail launch we've done it in pretty much all of our experiences because the breadth and depth of the beauty at that site is just extraordinary so when you think about those two kind of publishing platforms you're really getting the creative tools that you need to build at scale that's sort of how the powering metaphor came maybe it's the last question help me set the stage for hell I just like I set the stage for 2014 you have already revamped almost the entire mobile product lineup except for messenger so are we gonna finally see a revamp of messenger and if you won't answer that what can you tell us about 2014 I'm not gonna answer the first question 2014 so I think first part of kind of that revolution going back to the earlier point and creating those products getting the users getting the company back to growth we shared on a couple of the earnings calls the fact that actually we returned to growth in terms of page views and user engagement in fact returning two years of losses right so we basically eclipsed even 2011 numbers now that's extraordinary the next part of that revolution is typically monetization than what you do so we are spending a tremendous amount of time thinking about how to get that user experience right experimenting innovating some of the stuff that my colleague Scott Berkun Ounces on stage really critical the stuff that David talked about in terms of tumblr and native ads what we're basically saying is we're gonna get these ad formats right and when you have that kind of user scale and you get those ad formats right the system starts to really kick adam keyne has really big plans for Yahoo's mobile products in 2014 and the Android home screen replacement changes to the rest of Yahoo's mobile product lineup and an ambition to make more money on mobile than young ever has before can he do it the ambitions are sky-high now he actually has to go out and deliver