 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 announced 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 of these redesigns about? So I'll probably answer it mostly from the mobile perspective because that's really where I spend most of my time. I kind of frame it in a way of saying it's like starting a revolution. What you need to start a revolution is first you need people. You need exceptional talent. And 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, if we're really going to be a mobile first company and we're going to 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 result of that, Casey, is now starting to show. 2013, like you said, we pretty much reimagined every single experience at Yahoo. There's a few that we're still working on. And for mobile, when I started, we reached 150 million monthly users. We now, and Marissa shared it on stage, we now reach over 400 million monthly. That's just extraordinary growth. We added over 100 million in the last eight months alone. I'd love to say that's purely because of the products that we're creating. A lot of that is 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. So when you have those 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 going to cannibalize desktop? I always find those conversations incredibly bizarre because, one, I can't 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 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, big display ads, what happens? How do we, we're going to go from dollars to dimes. And the answer there is definitively no. Actually, these devices are immersive, personalized, more focus of the user's 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. Actually 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 ads, we've got more and more of 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 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 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 going to be a crossover year. If you saw the math that Marissa showed on stage, 800 million, so this is exclusive of Tumblr, just Yahoo proper, 800 million monthly users at Yahoo, 400 million mobile users. We're at that like perfect 50-50 right now. Page views, 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 than we will even on desktop. That's an extraordinary statement, right, to cross over at that scale. All right. 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 Aviate, which makes a kind of home screen replacement for Android. What are you going to 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? Aviate is really spot on for where we see search. In a previous incarnation, what most of us understood as search was we would type into a box and anticipatory computing in that context was search suggest. 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. It is a core part of our business. 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 local application for when I'm in a new city? What do I actually look for? What are those kinds of things? I think their approach is where this is going. How do you make it valuable to Yahoo outside of Android? 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, for us, it's mostly in affordance of the different kinds of APIs and things that we can do in that platform. How that starts to extend, for example, in iOS or others, is in thinking about systems, thinking about system design. 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 and 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 in 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. 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 user value. Right. 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 love it. I mean, I think it's great from 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 fair share of endless streams, you've introduced an app that says, you know, we're going to give you like 10 things and then you're done. Talk to me about like kind of what brought you guys to that place. 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 love 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. Really 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 bit that 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 that that idea could trickle into other products? So my hope, and I think 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. For me, one of the things that I've observed is a lot of the news presentation or information presentation generally on the web takes its cues from basic HTML, and it's a page layout. And it's pretty simple. And actually, if we take the metaphor of magazines and what we actually experience when we look at some of those things, the layouts are pretty complex. Sometimes they're offset, they have titling, they have all kinds of layouts. I believe that those atoms, so those elements, the distillation of saying, this is the key point, 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 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 refine the public's idea of what Yahoo is all about, you're 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, like on the mobile side. What are Tumblr and Flickr going to 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. Flickr 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 were really built as platforms because they're really about users contributing, sharing out, doing 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. They're really frankly creative tools. What's unique is Tumblr has the opportunity to power a lot of the digital magazine efforts, so kind of the next gen 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, right? You can go as deep as you want in Tumblr, 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. I mean 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 as a last question, help me set the stage for 2014. You have already revamped almost the entire mobile product lineup except for Messenger. So are we going to finally see a revamp of Messenger? And if you won't answer that, what can you tell us about 2014? I'm not going to answer the first question. 2014, so I think first part of that revolution going back to the earlier point, 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. So we basically eclipsed even 2011 numbers now. That's extraordinary. The next part of that revolution is typically monetization and what you do. So we're 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 Burke announced 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 going to 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 K.N. has really big plans for Yahoo's mobile products in 2014. An Android home screen replacement, changes to the rest of Yahoo's mobile product lineup, and an ambition to make more money on mobile than Yahoo ever has before. Can he do it? The ambitions are sky high. Now he actually has to go out and deliver.
 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 announced 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 of these redesigns about?
 So I'll probably answer it mostly from the mobile perspective because that's really where
 I spend most of my time.
 I kind of frame it in a way of saying it's like starting a revolution.
 What you need to start a revolution is first you need people.
 You need exceptional talent.
 And 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, if we're really going to
 be a mobile first company and we're going to 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 result of that, Casey, is now starting to show.
 2013, like you said, we pretty much reimagined every single experience at Yahoo.
 There's a few that we're still working on.
 And for mobile, when I started, we reached 150 million monthly users.
 We now, and Marissa shared it on stage, we now reach over 400 million monthly.
 That's just extraordinary growth.
 We added over 100 million in the last eight months alone.
 I'd love to say that's purely because of the products that we're creating.
 A lot of that is 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.
 So when you have those 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 going to cannibalize desktop?
 I always find those conversations incredibly bizarre because, one, I can't 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 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, big display ads,
 what happens?
 How do we, we're going to go from dollars to dimes.
 And the answer there is definitively no.
 Actually, these devices are immersive, personalized, more focus of the user's 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.
 Actually 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 ads, we've got more and
 more of 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 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 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 going to be a crossover year.
 If you saw the math that Marissa showed on stage, 800 million, so this is exclusive of
 Tumblr, just Yahoo proper, 800 million monthly users at Yahoo, 400 million mobile users.
 We're at that like perfect 50-50 right now.
 Page views, 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 than we will even on desktop.
 That's an extraordinary statement, right, to cross over at that scale.
 All right.
 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
 Aviate, which makes a kind of home screen replacement for Android.
 What are you going to 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?
 Aviate is really spot on for where we see search.
 In a previous incarnation, what most of us understood as search was we would type into
 a box and anticipatory computing in that context was search suggest.
 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.
 It is a core part of our business.
 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 local
 application for when I'm in a new city?
 What do I actually look for?
 What are those kinds of things?
 I think their approach is where this is going.
 How do you make it valuable to Yahoo outside of Android?
 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, for us, it's mostly in affordance of the different kinds of APIs
 and things that we can do in that platform.
 How that starts to extend, for example, in iOS or others, is in thinking about systems,
 thinking about system design.
 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 and 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 in 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.
 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 user value.
 Right.
 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 love it.
 I mean, I think it's great from 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 fair share of endless streams, you've introduced an app
 that says, you know, we're going to give you like 10 things and then you're done.
 Talk to me about like kind of what brought you guys to that place.
 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 love 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.
 Really 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 bit that 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 that that idea could trickle
 into other products?
 So my hope, and I think 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.
 For me, one of the things that I've observed is a lot of the news presentation or information
 presentation generally on the web takes its cues from basic HTML, and it's a page layout.
 And it's pretty simple.
 And actually, if we take the metaphor of magazines and what we actually experience when we look
 at some of those things, the layouts are pretty complex.
 Sometimes they're offset, they have titling, they have all kinds of layouts.
 I believe that those atoms, so those elements, the distillation of saying, this is the key
 point, 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 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 refine the public's idea of what Yahoo is all about, you're 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, like on the mobile side.
 What are Tumblr and Flickr going to 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.
 Flickr 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 were really built as platforms because they're really
 about users contributing, sharing out, doing 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.
 They're really frankly creative tools.
 What's unique is Tumblr has the opportunity to power a lot of the digital magazine efforts,
 so kind of the next gen 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, right?
 You can go as deep as you want in Tumblr, 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.
 I mean 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 as a last question, help me set the stage for 2014.
 You have already revamped almost the entire mobile product lineup except for Messenger.
 So are we going to finally see a revamp of Messenger?
 And if you won't answer that, what can you tell us about 2014?
 I'm not going to answer the first question.
 2014, so I think first part of that revolution going back to the earlier point, 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.
 So we basically eclipsed even 2011 numbers now.
 That's extraordinary.
 The next part of that revolution is typically monetization and what you do.
 So we're 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 Burke announced 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 going to 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 K.N. has really big plans for Yahoo's mobile products in 2014.
 An Android home screen replacement, changes to the rest of Yahoo's mobile product lineup,
 and an ambition to make more money on mobile than Yahoo ever has before.
 Can he do it?
 The ambitions are sky high.
 Now he actually has to go out and deliver.