Guest
Matt Sanchez
Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo
A career in digital media, from nonprofit public service announcements to running operations at Yahoo, arguing that usefulness now beats tonnage.
About
Matt Sanchez is Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo, the 31-year-old internet business that was taken private in 2021 and which, by his account, reaches nine in 10 Americans every month across Finance, Sports, Mail, News, Search and Weather. He is known for arguing that answer engines are a new category rather than an upgrade to search, and that publishers now have to build utility around their content to serve a smaller, far higher intent audience.
Sanchez started out trying to solve a distribution problem for nonprofits, helping them build public service announcements and reach audiences on television at a point when independent filmmakers were gaining access to cheap digital production tools. That work led him into democratising video publishing on the web, and then into the harder commercial question behind it, the monetisation of short-form video. As he puts it, one thing led to another.
He joined Yahoo around its move into private ownership in 2021, and describes the scale of the business as a key part of what attracted him. He argues that both sides of the company, the consumer properties and the Yahoo DSP, answer to a single mission of being a trusted guide. Sanchez has spent time on both the publisher side and the platform side of the industry, and that dual view shapes his position on the current moment: publishers should control and be paid for how their content trains models, and should earn their place in those models with expertise, recency and relevancy. He says there is more curiosity among marketers now than he has seen in 20 years in advertising.
Career23 years
- 2021 to now Yahoo Chief Operating Officer
- 2018 to 2021 Hearst President, Hearst Autos
- 2010 to 2018 SAY Media CEO
- 2005 to 2010 VideoEgg CEO
Show earlier roles: MediaLiquid
- 2003 to 2004 MediaLiquid Co-founder
How Matt thinks3 convictions
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Answers as a new category
Sanchez refuses to frame Scout as an improved search product. In his reading, consumers now expect the work taken out of research, an answer delivered with confidence, and waypoints back to the sources that produced it. He expects that to increase the total volume of inquiry rather than simply redistribute it.
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Density of value over reach
Sanchez expects the audiences arriving at publisher content to be far smaller and far more qualified. His answer is for content creators to stop selling aggregate consumption and instead build utility, comparison guides, tested metrics, store locators, around the people they know are close to a decision. Fewer visits, worth considerably more each.
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Machines for workflow, humans for strategy
Sanchez sees tactical workflow moving steadily to machines as companies invest in shared knowledge bases and repeatable skills. What that buys, in his view, is room for strategy, plus a class of connections in the data that no team had the time or intuition to spot. He describes the pairing of human strategist and machine insight as the source of richer outcomes.