The Rebooting Show

Yahoo's Kat Downs Mulder on the portal's comeback

Everything comes back in fashion. Why not the portal? Yahoo is a true legacy brand of the internet. An OG portal that failed to stem the rise of Google, missed on buying Facebook and for the last four-plus years has been a ward of private equity under the ownership of Apollo. It’s also found the market turning in its favor in many ways.Kat Downs Mulder, svp and general manager of Yahoo News and home, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the portal’s comeback.

The connection economy

In this episode, I talk with James Capo, CEO of audience data platform Omeda, about why the traffic-driven media model has finally run out of road and what replaces it. We dig into the idea of a “connection economy,” where audience relationships—not page views—are the core asset. We also get into why so many publishers struggle to operationalize audience-first strategies, how B2B and consumer media models are converging, and where AI fits if it’s meant to add real utility rather than repeat past mistakes.Thanks to James and Omeda for supporting The Rebooting as partners.

Content and community

Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman discusses how the publishing company is focusing its niche brands increasingly on events as it retools its model from the traffic era. Affiliate revenue is now a third of what it was at its peak, while experiential has risen from "effectively zero" five years ago to 12% of overall revenue and rising.

The open web needs a new economic model

For two decades, the economics of the open web rested on a simple bargain: platforms indexed content, publishers got traffic, and monetization happened downstream. AI breaks that loop by delivering answers without the click.This week, I’m joined by Doug Leeds, former head of IAC Publishing and now CEO of RSL, to unpack what comes next. We talk about why the old traffic-for-content deal is collapsing, why pay-per-crawl is a dead end, and how collective licensing could create a new economic layer for publishers and creators. A conversation about leverage, incentives, and whether the web can adapt to AI without losing the ability to fund original work

The messiness of streaming advertising

In the second round of our TRB Conversations powered by EX.CO, I spoke to EX.CO CEO Tom Pachys about why the streaming landscape is even more chaotic than online advertising; Manas Mittal from Uber discussed why mobility advertising has become a new category; and Vayner Media executive Andrea Sullivan talked about why Gay Vaynerchuk’s group is expanding into professional development network, Vyve.