Technology shapes media consumption: Verizon Media CEO

Guru Gowrappan, CEO of Verizon Media, discusses how the company is navigating the coronavirus pandemic, including a decline in advertising.

Video Transcript

GURU GOWRAPPAN: So first of all, we've been playing offense now, at least for me, when I look back two years, and we've been focused on growth. And you take Yahoo Finance as an example. But Yahoo News-- these properties and products have been growing on user consumption, and also revenue. We've seen that over the entire year as well.

So as a technology and media company, we have a unique advantage as we look at the media landscape today and the landscape tomorrow. So the way we are addressing it-- coming back to what I was talking about 5G earlier, 5G continues to take hold to fundamentally shape the type of content and information that is created and how it is disseminated across and consumed. And technology will shape that consumption.

In terms of our strategy, we've been investing mostly on trusted news and content, high-growth areas, as well as continued innovation like immersive and 5G. In these categories, typically we are leaders, either number one or number two. And that stayed that way because of the effort we put on playing offense.

And so we are really focused on creating trusted content that informs, educates, and entertains, and delivering it in the format we think best fits the content. So we are definitely addressing all the right areas to address consumer needs.

As I mentioned earlier, this has led to record growth on Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, Entertainment, and Life. If you think about lifestyle overall, it's ranked number one. Finance-- the network is ranked number one for us. It's a great example, touching about 80 million monthly active users.

So the overall aspect is, we treat ourself as a platform, not just content creators. So for consumers, we bring our own content, and also, great third parties come in as an aggregator.

And then on the B2B side, when you talk about the ad industry, we are focused on streaming, which is doing really well for us. And ads-- where categories like travel, of course, have declined, but the categories, you take a lot of media content, entertainment, new retail, commerce, and gaming, a lot of this have been growing at a crazy level. So we've been focused on that to mitigate some of the ad declines we've had.

So while the ad market, as you said, is impacted we are seeing a good rebound now in some of the [? core ?] articles. And estimates are very positive as we head into the rest of Q4 and 2021.