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Comment by resist_futility | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone here can explain but why would another large company such as Verizon want to buy dying brands such as AOL and Yahoo? The user base of such sites is drying up. They could be replaced by Google tomorrow if people just stopped using them and went elsewhere for the same information and services. The brands themselves are losing value everyday as a new generation grows up without ever knowing what they were.

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Someone explained this to me recently with a simple analogy that may be helpful to you as well. Suppose the average user of AOL is 50 years old and non technical. That person has a decent amount of purchasing power and is likely to not significantly change their purchasing habits over the next 20 years. So there's a high chance of vendor lock-in and value capture even if there is actually no technological progress to speak of.

Yahoo has basically 3 things that are still valuable and are actually pretty good: Sports, Finance, Mail. I occasionally use Yahoo Finance myself.

They have nice iOS apps for Finance and Weather.

Agree - Also, I think every 'program some finance stuff yourself' tutorial and online course ever has been built starting with pulling data from Yahoo finance.

Yahoo's finance site is far, far ahead of any other that I've tried. I'll be sorry to see that go. When I try another site I feel like grabbing the collar of its developers and demanding to know what is wrong with them.

Example: https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/BABA,BIIB,FB,QQQ,UPS,VHT/vi...

I.e. with one click I can get a custom snapshot of whatever basket I'm interested in, with everything there and links to drill down for more.

> They could be replaced by Google tomorrow if people just stopped using them and went elsewhere for the same information and services.

Because people won't "just stop using them." Yahoo's current users aren't the early adopter type. They don't like change, or trying new things.

To be fair, they WERE early adopters, that's how they ended up on Yahoo in the first place. It's the GMail crowd who showed up late, when everyone was getting webmail.

I was an active Internet user before/during Yahoo!'s rise -- it was NEVER the choice of technical early-adopters. (Flickr kinda was, as an acquisition, in a narrow space)

It was always the kinda-dowdy boring brand for non-technical people. Even at the very beginning it wasn't even the go-to link list for smart/knowledgeable people. Yahoo! Mail was for people who were too unresourced to have their own mail accounts or maintain university/work/etc. accounts.

... But who had dial-up. Seriously, same with AOL. 99% of people had never even heard of the Internet until the late-90s. As much as we disparage them now, they really were ahead of the crowd back then.

AOL isn't a "dying brand". It's a massive player in digital advertising, and Verizon bought them for the same reason Comcast bought Freewheel.

LOL. Those who think "AOL" is a "dying brand" on here are the same ones who think Node.js is scalable and reliable.

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