Yahoo News Digest

» see news.yahoo.com/digest as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

summly was an iphone app made by a british fifteen year old in 2011. it summarized news articles. by 2013 it had been downloaded a million times and taken horizons ventures money. yahoo bought it in march 2013 for a reported thirty million dollars. the kid was seventeen. yahoo kept nick d'aloisio on as a product manager, and at ces in january 2014 marissa mayer announced what they had built on top of summly's technology: yahoo news digest.

the format was simple in a way most news apps were not. each digest had eight stories, each story summarized down to one screen of text. the digest dropped at 8am local time and again at 6pm local time. between drops the app did not refresh. there was no infinite feed. when you finished a digest the app told you that you were done. that was the whole product.

it won the 2014 apple design award. yahoo took home the same trophy again in 2015. for a few quarters in 2014 and 2015 it sat in the app store as the example of what a serious newspaper-as-app could look like in the post-flipboard era. then verizon bought yahoo for $4.5 billion. mayer left. the long process of killing yahoo apps began. d'aloisio resigned in october 2015. on june 5, 2017 yahoo announced news digest would generate its last digest on june 30. that morning the eight stories were the last eight. the next morning the app opened to a blank screen.

by 2014 i was thirty, on ttnet broadband at home, reading turkish news from sozcu and hurriyet in the morning before work. yahoo news digest was an english language product. it summarized the new york times and the bbc, not posta. turkish news consumption in 2014 was not about reading eight stories and closing the app. it was about pulling to refresh a homepage forever, every refresh another column of breaking headlines about football transfers or politics. yahoo news digest's whole pitch ran against the way the turkish web worked.

~ the record ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the idea that you could be done with the news for the day. summly's algorithm was real and the apple design award was real, but the thing they were selling was the idea that news has a stopping point. that you finish at 8:05am and you do not check again until 6pm. every news app built after news digest sold the opposite. they sold notifications and push alerts at 2am. by 2018 nobody at any platform was trying to make an app you could finish.

~ what nick d'aloisio became ~

the seventeen year old who sold summly to yahoo went to oxford in 2015, studied philosophy and computer science, and has appeared periodically in tech press as the recurring "teen who sold an app for thirty million" reference point. in 2024 he resurfaced building ai products. the algorithm he built at fifteen was lstm based summarization on phones in 2011, four years before transformer attention. it was prescient, and the price tag included the brand value of the founder being seventeen.

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