Hacker News Reader

Comment by howlingfantods | Hacker News Reader

Buffett is no fool. Berkshire is providing the financing to Dan Gilbert's group and will receive guaranteed interest as well as an option to convert to equity. I'm sure that financing is jammed packed with warrants and covenants.

Buffett has basically parlayed the prestige of his name into sweetheart deals with provisions that no other company could get (eg. his investment in Goldman Sachs).

View on HN

Yeah - this is likely a place for Buffett to park some cash with sensible returns/risk for Berkshire. It is not likely to be Buffett jumping into the tech business.

My guess is that Buffett's team looked generally at the risks within Yahoo and hedged them with generous covenants on the financing.

I am surprised that Gilbert didn't get Wall St financing. I would think that analysts at the big banks could structure a deal more carefully aligned with the underlying risks.

It's probably not just the sheen of his name. A very large, wealthy, & motivated investor can be an asset. I vaguely remember an old story about him; one of his companies was having trouble with their paper vendor. He found out, and promptly bought the paper vendor. Problem solved.

But who cares about yahoo? (Serious question) yahoo should just die. Please tell me why it shouldn't

Because it's a global top 5 web property with a billion+ monthly users.

As a consumer, it might make sense to say this.

From a business perspective (he says having no business experience or expertise), Yahoo is a collection of assets: Code, people, branding, community. They aren't in first place, and they aren't profitable at the moment, but I think the case that they have zero or negative value is a bit simplistic.

Put it another way: Would you rather throw a pile of money at trying to build a collection of code, talent, business contracts, and users from scratch, or would you rather buy an EXISTING collection, on the cheap, and work instead to flip it into a profitable business? Both are risky ventures, but everything I've seen says it's harder to build from scratch than it is to keep existing users.

Perhaps your answer is that you'd prefer to build it from scratch, but do you see why - if the answer takes some thought to determine - that someone else might come to a different conclusion?

Heck, even if you want to completely toss the business model - even if you want to toss everything they've done and what they are trying to do - I'd imagine the servers, in-house expertise, and collected code and utilities, not to mention any purchased or licensed software, would make Yahoo worth considering as an acquisition.

Big misconception: Yahoo is profitable, it's just not growing.

Check. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/19/yahoo-qua...

Yahoo announced falling revenues and a quarterly loss of $99.2m on Tuesday - from April 19, 2016

You zoomed in on a quarter, which is not a good way to look at it. From an annual standpoint, they have been profitable for each of the last 4 years, excluding 2015. 2015 Included a massive impairment of goodwill (which is not a cash expense) at $4.4B[0] and would have otherwise been profitable.

[0] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1011006/0001193125164...

Just one quarter due to accounting. Annually quite profitable. Ugh, I wish the Guardian was more financially literate.

> Ugh, I wish the Guardian was more financially literate.

Then how could it bend the facts to meet their bias?

Why does it need to grow? Maybe growth is limited, and when it's not, it's dangerous.

You have to give shareholders a return through stock growth or through dividends.

Mega-companies will only ever end up eventually creating a G+. 300 smaller companies each doing a few things well. That is true growth.

Every time you use the word "growth" to describe "success", you will find that you only have new mouths to feed.

That's patently false. Pun intended. Innovation is not limited to startups. Underneath the hood, there's an absolutely massive amount of r&d and innovation that goes into Intel's chips year on year. Google's progress in machine learning for speech and photos is impressive. The big companies often do very well innovating. Intel producing another innovation that drives a billion dollars of sales isn't as exciting as a startup doing the same, but both are real.

You're talking about the economy in a "Plinko chip" sort of way, and I'm talking about community building. If you want good products and a well paying society, you need to promote more individual nodes rather than giant motherships. And by "promote", I mean actually want it instead of talking about how the rules apply to the current system.

And if something is patently false I shouldn't be able to point to hundreds of examples where you're wrong.

You don't need to grow to provide a decent dividend to shareholders. You just need to reliably produce a profit. If your dividend represents an acceptable ROI it doesn't particularly matter if you are not growing.

Of course having a good dividend AND capital growth would be desirable but shareholders won't complain too loud about a company that just spits out dividends year after year.

Apple's trying to keep people happy, but they keep freaking out.

Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else.

But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on.

There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as their default homepage ten years ago.

You can hear the fail in their words. They're talking about retaining users, not offering value. They still want to be a portal (ie the base of every action you take), something users didn't want when it was new.

That's the business legacy you'd have to reverse before you stop producing negative-value, let alone actually produce something that may actually be valuable.

slight variation: I was talking about Yahoo ABSENT the profitable sub-groups. The part that apparently has negative value.

I fail to believe that Yahoo, minus Ali Baba and Fantasy sports and similar bits, is actively NEGATIVE value. It might be poorly run and have the poor actions you're talking about. (okay, it DOES have the negatives you mention).

That doesn't mean what's there "should just die" - it's a business opportunity to take that and use it profitably.

A fair number of people use Yahoo mail and Yahoo search. It's not a majority of the market by any means, but it's still tens to hundreds of millions of users all told.

They also own tumblr iirc.

I don't know if tumblr is profitable, but it has many users.

edit: whoops this was already mentioned a number of times in other comments.

> Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else.

My understanding is that's the one thing that is not up for sale these days, and that all relevant discussions are regarding the spinoff of their core web businesses.

Yahoo has over 1B MAUs. One. Billion. The vast majority of those don't even touch the homepage.

Yep. I regularly use http://finance.yahoo.com/ and http://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy/ when in season. The finance site is one of the better ones. Google has not updated theirs in so long I'm surprised they have not just turned it off.

I don't know how monetizable it is, but yahoo groups is still very actively used. It's amazing the number of times I'm trying to find information about a bit of software or hardware, and find myself landing on a yahoo groups archive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups#Site_statistics

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-burrus/yahoo-groups_b_1...

Interesting insight, guess that explains why MySpace was bought as well.

MySpace was bought for exactly that reason. It has a large enough number of returning monthly visitors (accessing archived photos and what not) for that data to be valuable to the adtech vendor that bought it. If you're looking to acquire lots and lots of customer data, there are far cheaper ways to go about it than trying to build your own social network from scratch.

A lot of non-technical older users still use Yahoo properties. My mom still uses Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo.com is her homepage (by choice).

I don't know how to quantify what that's worth, but I can't imagine it's nothing.

At least in Eastern Europe, most developers in the 90's used yahoo (mail + messenger) and a lot of them still do, even though not exclusively anymore.

Because this is why: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and...

I forgot they bought Tumblr

= 50 million visitors/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com/

Yahoo Answers is still a big useless SEO machine

= 50 million users/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/answers.yahoo.com/

Yahoo Sports is very popular from what I understand

= 12 million users https://siteanalytics.compete.com/sports.yahoo.com/

Yahoo Finance, ditto

= 14 million visitors/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/finance.yahoo.com/

Yahoo News, ditto

= 20 million visitors/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.yahoo.com/

Yahoo mail is still doing alright isn't it?

= 50 million users https://siteanalytics.compete.com/mail.yahoo.com/

Flickr is still ranked pretty high on Alexa but on a definite decline: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/flickr.com

= 15 million visitors/month: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.yahoo.com/

Except for Finance and maybe Tumblr, aren't all these services fading ?

* Yahoo Answers

Quora ( 100M users [1] ) and Stack Exchange is now the default question & answer sites.

* Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports

Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google.

* Yahoo mail

Gmail ( 1B users [3] and grew 100 Million users just last year )

* Flickr

Google Photos ( 100M users in 5 months [4] )

It seems like Google Finance is losing [5] as they see it as part of search but it appears there is a need for a good separate product here. Tumblr looks to be a runaway success ( 227 million registered accounts, more than double the number of accounts a year prior and more than 37 million unique visitors [6]), no match for Wordpress yet ( WordPress.com records 126M unique visitors per month [7] ), but the social aspects looks to work in Tumblr's favor.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/21/quora-claims-10-of-u-s-pop...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/19/outsell-google-news/

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-...

[4] http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9576713/google-photos-100...

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-finance-yahoo-finance-...

[6] http://www.statista.com/topics/2463/tumblr/

[7] https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpres...

> * Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports

> Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google.

Yahoo Sports is a lot more than just sports news and scores. The traffic is heavily driven by fantasy sports, which Google doesn't have.

Yahoo owns both Tumblr and Flickr.

Alexa ranks Yahoo News the 8th most popular news source on the Internet. More popular than Fox News, BBC, and WSJ.

Yahoo Mail is still used by millions.

This community often seems to think that something is dead just because people don't use it in SCs or in startups, completely forgetting the average person. By their logic Windows is dead, Oracle is dying etc. the only successful companies are Google and Apple.

They run a whole bunch of really useful services. Their personalized homepage is still great.

If they would just maintain what they've got and stop swinging for the fences - turn into something like the Apache Foundation was in their early years - they'd provide a lot of value for a lot of people.

isn't yahoo google's failed retarded little brother? I don't see them becoming anything, anytime soon. The only point of this acquisition would be to pivot the whole thing hard or to dismantle it and spread its resources to other assets

Reply on news.ycombinator.com