Today’s conversation is a discussion of the modern portal with Yahoo’s Kat Downs Mulder.
We had quite a crowd at a bar in Soho in London last Thursday for the first TRB Media Mixer, a new series of informal gatherings for Media People. Was great to see everyone who turned up from The Economist, Financial Times, Hello, News Corp, Daily Mail, Future, The Telegraph, Condé Nast, The Guardian, TikTok and more. Thanks to Beehiiv for its support as co-host for the Mixer. We’ll be having another in NYC next month.
Media People gather in their natural habitat
I’m of the belief that everything comes back in fashion, even the mixer. You just have to be patient, although the men with skinny jeans should just move on. The portal is interesting again. Traffic patterns, to put it mildly, have permanently changed. Portals remain as reliable starting points for millions and a reliable option for those uninterested yet in setting up their own OpenClaw instance, which is to say 99% of people. More below in my conversation with Kat and on PvA, the growing gap between AImaxxers and the Rest of Us.
In 2025, Omeda delivered 7.6 billion emails with 1.9 billion being in Q4 2025 — with strong delivery (99%) and stable open rates (48%).
Our team then aggregated and anonymized all of that data from client emails sent from our platform into a single Email Engagement Report so that you can understand how your emails are performing. Covered in this report:
Email marketing benchmarks
2025 email trends quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.
Performance benchmarks broken out by newsletters, promotional, events, and more
The latest click bot numbers
The drop in click rates
The portal’s unlikely comeback
Everything comes back. 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. Highlights:
The power of habit. Yahoo gets 75% of its traffic direct thanks to habit utilities like mail and Yahoo Finance’s portfolio tracking features. That’s a massive advantage in a pageview market that’s under severe compression. "Our role is to help people find the best content on the internet,” Kat said. “It's to help them have a starting point for their day.”
The great traffic deflation. Publishers talk about their events businesses, but they often still rely on traffic to prop up their business models. Research shows that Google’s AI Overviews result in 58% fewer clicks. Yahoo’s old school aggregator role becomes more attractive in a world where traffic volume has gone down – and become less predictable. “With the way that the generative AI tools are built, they’re meant to keep you within their product itself,” Kat said.
Portals are still sticky. According to Yahoo, 80% of visitors use multiple products. Yahoo’s added a creators program and is looking to take a modern approach to its traditional role as the average person’s guide to a vast information economy. “The portal never left,” Kat said. “It just evolved.”
Content bundles are winning. The New York Times has shown that news can often be a feature of a larger bundle. In fact, the Times’ non-news products are growing fastest. Yahoo’s portfolio across mail, finance, fantasy sports and search position its news as another utility product rather than a life identity. It's not the only thing that people need,” Kat said. “They need to be able to take that information and act on it."
Search could get interesting. I spent years observing Yahoo fruitlessly try to compete head to head in search with Google. It eventually threw in the towel. Now, it’s making a search comeback of sorts with Scout, an AI-enabled search feature that takes more of an aggregation approach typical to Yahoo with prominent links to publishers (imagine!). “I don't think that people want to live their whole lives in a wall of text,” Kat said. “They want to be able to access and explore the internet."
Inside TechCrunch’s newsletter transformation
TechCrunch has long been known for newsletters like Mobility and StrictlyVC, but behind the scenes, slow workflows imposed by rigid tools held them back. After moving to beehiiv, everything changed, Mobility grew 14% in two months, StrictlyVC grew 4%, and editors could publish faster, experiment freely, and cut through dev bottlenecks. Cleaner segmentation improved deliverability and analytics, while new revenue levers, from sponsorships to paid options, opened up. With beehiiv, TechCrunch quickly turned its newsletters into a smarter engine for reach, retention, and revenue.
This week, we dive into the widening gap between the AImaxxers of Silicon Valley and the Rest of Us. Matt Shumer’s “Something big is happening” viral essay – the essay is having a moment on X – put the pieces together to argue that the massive shift to agentic coding is what is coming for other sectors, from marketing to journalism to law to medicine. Meanwhile, I spoke to nephew in an early-career position as a financial advisor who tells me the extent of their AI use is Copilot. I get the same response from those in biotech and pharmaceuticals. I don’t doubt that massive change is coming, but I’m also reminded that autonomous driving was around the corner over a decade ago and is only now becoming a reality.
Plus: Liberal arts are back in style, The Washington Post’s product problem, design systems as political language and the brewing anti-AI populism as data centers drive up energy costs and jobs get displaced to power “nudifying” apps.
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