YP Plans First-Round Bid for Yahoo

The company that introduced the world to the web is being bought by the yellow pages. This could only be more tragic in iambic pentameter.

Yellow pages and YP.com are dying faster than Yahoo! is. My observation. I just believe Yellow Page phone book advertising and/or directory listing advertising are scams.

If they were priced right compared to internet ads CPC - maybe. They aren't cheap though - they sell quarter page ads for lawyers in monthly payment installments lol

So this is really just a stalking-horse for AT&T to run up the acquisition price for Verizon, right?

I fear the main contenders are likely to scrap the excellent Yahoo mail.

Time to figure out how to backup and migrate 8 years of emails and move all services using this account for login to a new address.

The more time I spend on the 'net the more I am convinced everyone needs to own their own email address and be "portable" as services implode or are discontinued. This includes calendar, address book and anything else. Even with Gmail, if Google doesn't like you it's "poof" and everything is gone.

Time to back up my Flickr account (again).

YP would use Yahoo like a directory and sell a crap load of it to its clients. The cost would be 0. This would make it incredibly profitable for YP. They already bundle their print and online advertising in order to save accounts. This would be very profitable for them in the short term. They want the eyeballs to sell because nobody is reading the directory online or off.

The proposed deal is so complicated that it looks more like a tax shelter than a deal for an operating business: ..."a tax-free transaction in which YP would merge with a spun-off subsidiary of Yahoo’s core business." Presumably that means Yahoo minus their stake in Alibaba. That would allow monetizing Yahoo's tax loss.

YP digital has surprisingly large reach due to its distribution as a default application on AT&T phones. The business prints money, and has a ridiculous trove of local data that very few companies can provide (foursquare, yelp, etc), but which local search providers (Google, Yahoo, etc) need (all about that high intent).

I read the headline as saying YC rather than YP. Lol