Yahoo to Add Personalization Features With Artifact Acquisition

Yahoo will add artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personalization features across its platform, including Yahoo News, following its acquisition of Artifact.

This acquisition closed Friday (March 29), Yahoo said in a Tuesday (April 2) press release.

“Yahoo was one of the first to combine human and algorithmic curation of news,” Kat Downs Mulder, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, said in the release. “Since then, the landscape of machine learning and personalization has changed dramatically and Artifact has innovated with best-in-class technology to meet the moment.”

Artifact, an AI-driven news aggregation and discovery platform, was created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, according to the release.

The platform’s discovery engine surfaces content users most want to see, becomes attuned to users’ interests over time, and delivers a personalized feed of news stories, the release said. Artifact also incorporates link-sharing capabilities and tools to prevent clickbait proliferation.

With its acquisition by Yahoo, Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, per the release. Its proprietary technology will be incorporated into Yahoo, and its founders will work with Yahoo in an advisory capacity during the transition period.

“We built an intuitive product experience that users love and has the opportunity to benefit millions of people,” Systrom said in the release. “Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever.”

Artifact was launched in early 2023 and was one of a group of rising next-generation social engagement platforms that used simplified and streamlined text-based apps to draw together like-minded users and drive commerce through true interest and engagement, PYMNTS reported in April 2023.

These social media platforms aimed to provide an alternative to others that some feel have become saturated with ads and feeds that often fail to accurately reflect users’ true interests.

In another expansion of Yahoo’s services, that company said in October that it teamed up with Xperi to bring in-car video content to BMW drivers. That partnership brings video content from Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and In the Know to Xperi’s TiVo-powered DTS AutoStage video service.