Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.
Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.
The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money".
Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
There are also levels of conservatism: Buffet still takes risks. In any given year, there's a possibility that he loses money, even if he's amazing in the long term. This is very far from the extreme end of conservative investing where, for example, someone 2-3 years away from retirement shifts all of their investments into a low-yield guaranteed return investment to ensure that a temporary downturn in the economy doesn't wreck their ability to retire.
Betting with the momentum works unless (A) you're a latecomer to a ponzi scheme, or (B) there's a reversion that catalyzes longstanding doubt about an asset that has enjoyed a bull run. Both of these cases may well be applicable to a large portion of the overall crypto marketplace.
What you don't see much of is conservative investors who are super hot on crypto. Not necessarily because of anything about crypto, per se, so much as because part of being a conservative investor is that you don't really get super hot on anything.
That statement is demonstrably false. There are two reasons to not be invested in cryptocurrencies at this point in history. You are either ignorant of the technology (which is fine, lots of more important knowledge out there), or it doesn't fit your current risk profile.
There is not a knowledgeable person on the planet who would say that any investment in any cryptocurrency is bad for all investors.
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/charlie-munger-crypto-whole-...
>DOGE
Not really helping your case here
edit: later I am proud to have been downvoted by blockchain bozos.
2. What sectors are you invested in that are somehow immune to hype cycles?
nitpick: you cannot buy Doge off Coinbase even with 10,000 clicks.
I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.
Eg: Google Chrome on Android
Easy, just use version numbers which asymptotically approach an irrational number, like Knuth's TeX (currently at version 3.14159...ish)
But seriously, the incentive to be "done" is when a lot of other software relies on your API or file format. This is why mozillans throw such a tantrum whenever anybody tries to use their rendering engine as part of some other piece of software. Getting to "done" isn't fun.
Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
A lot of it is about presentation.
Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room.
A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products.
But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street.
And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes!
I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.
YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board.
Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.
It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.
Cox Media was my first employer (it was called Cox Interactive Media at the time), Verizon Media, my current employer.
At the time, I was on the team that ran CIM's web farm which hosted the web presence for all of Cox Enterprises' newspapers, TV, and radio stations. It was a couple dozen Sun Ultras with content on NetApp filers.
We ran the farm from Atlanta and connected to it over frame relay. We were colo'd in a datacenter in Sunnyvale. We were a few racks. Yahoo had a presence in the same DC. It was a room or two, PC's running FreeBSD and also quite a few NetApps.
The biggest spike in traffic we ever saw was when the Starr Report was released.
A couple years later, I was working for Loudcloud, now living in Sunnyvale. Visiting another datacenter, I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Fir...
Today, I work as part of the mobile tools team for Verizon Media. The product I'm responsible for is hosted in a combination of AWS and Verizon Media datacenters.
In some ways, there's been a lot of changes over the years, but in other ways, not so much.
What I used to run on Solaris, today I run on Linux, sometimes on a VM or in a container, but sometimes still on a dedicated server. What I used to code in Shell or Perl or C or Java, today I code in Shell or Python or C or Java or Go or JavaScript. What I used to package into RPMs, today I package into docker images. Databases are still databases. SQL is still SQL. Application servers and web servers are still application servers and web servers. The web is still the web. Input still can't be trusted. Buffers still overflow. Applications still crash.
Same shit, different day.
sidenote: Despite the appearance those werent random consumer motherboards. Supermicro P6SBM.
Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.
Mining shovels became worthless. People who owned exploitable resources continued to make money. (Also, denim)
If you won big on a gold/oil/internet strike you were much, much better off buying as many shovels you could at any price and mining for all you were worth.
Selling shovels is a reliable, lower risk business for a while. But Sun/SGI/Cray/Dell/Nortel/etc show the risks that come with relying on shovel income.
…“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.”
They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion.
I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair.
Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to keep ahold of the sports bits of Yahoo, which are seemingly popular. (Perhaps that’s why they even managed to get $5 billion for…what does AOL do?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon...
…color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
Most people’s lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had to go with a different ads biz model to not directly compete with the big two.
It doesn’t stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I’m hedging 6th in case there’s some one else between Microsoft and Amazon.
That said, single market players like TheTradeDesk or Xandr are larger in their own markets than verizon media, but probably not compared to the combined publisher and advertiser business: https://www.atlantic.net/vps-hosting/top-10-dsp-providers/
But then IAC, Verizon Media’s biggest properties, would be a mix of different things.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/buzzfeed-to-acquire-huffpost_...
It's funny to think that Yahoo was once thought of as an amazing stock tip to give someone. The movie came out in 2000 and was presumably written/filmed 1-2 years prior.
https://smithhousedesign.com/18-years-later-10-ironic-things...
“I am very rich. I bought Intel at $6.”
Lots of gems in that whole article.
How long has it been since an acquisition of either one of those companies made the acquirer any money? More than a decade?
They provide enough capital for a corporation to keep running while systematically stripping it down until only the most profitable core remains, then re-IPO'ing that husk of the company. Along the way, they make the most use of financialization to extract as much benefits as they can.
They serve a purpose in the ecosystem I guess. Its better than the company devolving into irrelevance or collapsing at once. Graceful termination means that everyone can wait for a ferry to take them away rather than jump ship.
Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?
I miss my Visor, tbh.
All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all.
Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market. Secondly, that five years down the line, there is someone else who is willing to pay for the shares at a premium of what they have originally purchased for. Now what about those who are buying 5 years down the line? They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money. And so on and so forth.
So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits.
Can everyone get their worth from the shares? Not at once. Not in a hurry.
With tech this might be implicit if they are “profitable and still in the market.” But it is different than say John Deer or Miller Paint in that regard.
The thing that sets me off about these threads is the (I believe sincere) thinking that 'well if that's the share price, it must be worth that much'. That's fine if you're speculating/trading but is absolutely wrong if you think what you're doing is investing.
Are we reading different posts? The post you responded to repeatedly made the point that profits are one of the key builders of market confidence:
>> Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market.
...
>> They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money.
...
>> So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits.
It's a key point of their argument!
The value of a company in a fair market is a function of the confidence of investors that someone in the future will pay more for the same stock.
For a highly profitable company like Facebook, this isn't a foolish confidence in anyway. Even if you don't like Facebook it would be a very radical position to take to think that their profits next quarter will be remarkably lower than this quarter.
In greater fool theory, you know there is no reason the investment is going to increase in value. You are just hoping someone else is going to buy from you and accept that risk too.
When you are counting on the 'confidence' of future investors to (over)pay more than you did for something, rather than any rational valuation, you are quite literally counting on a greater fool[1] being willing to buy it from you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory - note that it isn't always about an asset having no value, just that for an overpriced asset that there will be someone else willing to pay more for it.
But that's a difficult argument to make for Facebook. Facebook is highly profitable - they have averaged something like 80% gross profit margins for a decade[1] while sustaining significant revenue growth. That's pretty much guaranteed that their stock will continue to appreciate - with margins that high they have a lot of room to play with things to keep growth going.
What metric makes it look like that is a greater fool situation?
Investors will tell you that historical performance does not guarantee future performance. It’s one yardstick, but it’s not always the best one.
Facebook’s historical revenue growth was catalyzed by environmental factors that are shifting underneath them.
In 2021, FB would not be allowed to acquire Instagram or WhatsApp. In 2021, Apple (custodians of their most valuable user base) is no longer cooperating with adware.
What does future revenue growth for a Facebook look like, who is not allowed to acquire upstart competitors, who is not allowed to extract maximum value from its mines, and who is facing regulatory scrutiny for past deeds?
Would you be willing to bet that $900B, or $300ish/share on $30 revenue/share have these uncertainties priced-in?
Yahoo! and AOL were dumpster fires in comparison, of course. But I wouldn’t be so certain that FB hasn’t passed its peak valuation, just because it has had a money printing machine for the past decade.
Their average revenue per user increased by the largest amount ever (in both absolute and percentage terms) last quarter.
In terms of technology challenges, the iOS changes will reduce FB's ability to target ads. However, it is quite possible this will lead to more revenue for FB because the market structure (ie, domination by FB and Google) means FB maybe able to pass on the loss inefficiency to advertisers.
Or perhaps a medieval wheel of fortune.
[1]: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/539503/view/the-wheel-of-...
I'm very skeptical about that claim.
If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me.
Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )
"Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from.
So - mostly it's fraud.
The mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground, stadiums, busy downtowns, shopping centers etc. but has poor penetration and range. Verizon looks to be wanting to use is for home broadband use as well with base stations mounted all around neighborhoods. I would imagine they see it replacing WiFi with easily provisioned access points in commercial business etc.
My understanding on low band is its a overlay on their 4G network for now so it works but has almost no benefit. There supposedly is benefits to the low band side such as lower latency and better spectrum sharing over 4G but it's unclear if that applies in an overlay scenario. Moving forward they will probably bring more low /medium bands on as 5G only, perhaps finally sunsetting their 3g network and refarming as 5g only.
Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ).
It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story )
That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested.
So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )
The only difficulty was that it had a hard time penetrating buildings. In my apartments, I could get 1-2 Mbps anywhere. But if I moved the modem into a window it was more like 25-75 Mbps.
I hope that some day 5G will be as good as WiMax was.
You can only blame Intel for WiMax Failure. Over Confidence, Over Hyped, poor delivery and at the time, nobody like them. I think it was 2008/9?
Verizon's next 5G investment is to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, in the C-Band (mid-band, 3.7-3.98 GHz, good speed, good propagation)
VZ spent $54B on C-Band spectrum in March, then committed to spend an additional $10B over the next 3 years to deploy towers to use that spectrum, and that's above the $18B they had already planned on mid-band 5G CAPEX
VZ is taking on a lot of debt to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, and this sale will help them chip away at that huge mountain of debt
There is.
>He added that Apollo would allow the business to grow, a more difficult prospect when it was operating within Verizon, which was planning to spend even more money to expand its next-generation 5G wireless network.
Do they really?
I am not being sarcastic. I cannot find a recent reference to this (everything seems to be from 2015), but given my experience getting my aunt away from AOL email: it seems horribly plausible.
"If you're interested in purchasing a plan that includes dialup service, please call 1-800-827-6364 (Mon-Fri: 8am-12am ET; Sat: 8am-10pm ET)"
I would not be surprised to learn that they still have millions of dial-up customers & millions on the new non-dialup plans.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
As to dialup itself…
“The number of dial-up users is now “in the low thousands,” according to a person familiar with the matter.”
…but, yeah, it seems 1.5 million discerning customers are basically paying for AOL mail.
“There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private.”
Which: nice business if you can get it.
And Apollo will gut these entities for every dollar that they can.
Soon it’ll be Yahoo & AOL sold for an NFT of an illustration of a pile of used AOL CDs.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americ...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americ...
… I’m not sure, but it seems plausible that if 3% had to use dialup 100% of those are on Aol (who else offers dialup?). So there’s probably a lot of money to be milked from that cash cow; along with their other ad & publishing businesses.
My parents (90's) still use AOL email, and have done so for over 25 years now. They used to use dialup, but now are on high speed internet (cable), using just the web interface for the email.
For their sake at least, I hope it doesn't go away any time soon. It works for them very well.
Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious.
For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimately have a better home than being the ugly duckling in Verizon's portfolio.
For Apollo, the benefits are obvious. There's probably lots of operational improvements to execute on, again due to the fact that Verizon was likely not really focused on these businesses. Presumably the fund will reap huge returns if they can deliver on these improvements and exit successfully and timely.
–––
EDIT: There is one more nuanced question I forgot to address: is this "really good" for the employees to? On an individual scale, probably not. I'm sure many people will be let go once Apollo is at the helm. But from a broader view, it is arguably "good" for everyone collective in the long run. Verizon really can't do much with the asset, so the alternative to selling is letting it wither away in the hopes of some miracle, with the more likely outcome being that Yahoo and AOL would become even worse shadows of their former selves with each passing day.
Eventually people would be let go anyway and those businesses could be shut down unless some miracle strategic buyer (i.e. not a private equity owner) came along and bought them. But most strategic buyers are not comfortable buying bad operations and turning them around. They find it too risky, so that's usually a job left to financial sponsors like Apollo who are built for that. In fact, these days most PEs are not even interested in turning operations around because they also find it too risky—and sponsors learned they can make more than enough money by just being great at finding sub-scale / non-core assets, putting them together in a "platform" and selling them to another sponsor or exiting through an IPO.
Apollo alone has done 150 private equity transactions, the vast majority of which have been tremendously successful otherwise investors would not be giving them more money to continue to invest.
That tends to work for investors; customers and employees, well.
The Artist Formerly Known as SolarWinds is PE owned.
Analogies are great for illustration, but not for arguments. They don't really prove anything.
Also, are there any stats explaining why so Yahoo still have so many daily visitors? Is it just result of having a ton of service and then the numbers afe bundled? It seems hard to understand that pages like Yahoo (or msn.com) would attract so many users as the Alexa ranking would suggest.
It may sound like a joke or sarcasm but it’s not, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we see this AOL/Yahoo turn into some type of crypto play that can be marketed on the back of the old brands.
I didn’t even think about something as simple meme stonk. It may sound like sarcasm and a joke, but look at the meme stonks or Doge ($11B+ market cap)...sure the kids on tik tok might not know what yahoo or aol are/were but that actually makes them fresh to the new generation, mixed in with a little nostalgia from those slightly older that would love to jump on the next rocket going to the moon...it’s seriously just 1 Elon tweet from a doubling in value.
Lots of opinions on the matter but essentially, Wall Street players shorted the stock, “Main Street” day traders got wind of the play and pumped the stock (in one instance it would have resulted in loses in the billions of a single fund and probably bankrupted them), either that fund or a major investor of that fund is an investor in Robinhood which is an app used by a significant number of the main street option traders pumping game stop stock, Robinhood allegedly on the order of said investors/fund froze certain orders on game stop stock (and a few other meme stocks) for about 24-48 hours which sank the price of the stock and allowing Wall Street to minimize their losses and close their positions. Of course Robinhood has done what it could on their end to distance themself from the investor/fund and on more than one occasion made official statements why they stopped orders on the cherry picked stocks, basically falling on their own sword and more or less saying they were under funded and over leveraged.
You can sort of trace the recent crypto market pump to this event, as a result of Main Street throwing in the towel (right or wrong) because the collective acceptance market is rigged.
That arrangement would have been quite appealing for Verizon, since by this time there was likely a surplus of aging bare metal servers in Yahoo's datacenters, and these would otherwise be difficult for Verizon to monetize.
disclosure: worked for Tumblr but left long before this sale and not directly familiar with any of the specifics of the deal
Untrue.
When the goal is to buy Blogger - a goal that is being progressed towards by Automattic - money saved on the Tumblr acquisition is useful.
I'm not Marco, if that's what you're asking? I post here with my full real name and have links in my HN profile...
Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.
Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute that.
Sure you can, though branding isn't the only way to make a successful business. Kleenex knock-offs thrive even though nobody ever says "please hand me the Generic Tissue Paper". Assuming there are professionals involved (not just rich techbros that have held on since founding) tech companies should be operated the same as non-tech companies. Build a good product, keep costs down, drive sales, put away cash, grow your market.
Once AOL and Yahoo were acquired, it should have been possible to convert them into factories for generic content and services, and service many small brands. But you need an experienced executive and management class that can do this efficiently. It's much easier to turn an acquisition into an poorly-run independent cash cow, or plunder its IP and eliminate it.
I've seen acquisitions go many ways. In some, the parent company may end up more like the acquisition because its business or product was more robust. Other times the point was to obtain some tech and absorb it into the parent company's products. Other times they just wanted a steady cash flow and a foothold into a new market. Sometimes they keep the acquisition fairly independent, because it already has a strong brand and products and they seem to be fucking up less than other acquisitions. Sometimes the companies' execs were literally just golf buddies and one just decided to help the other out of a bind. Sometimes they have no idea why the fuck they bought it or what to do with it, some moron at the top just thought "we need an X, we'll figure out what to do with it later". Sometimes
Apparently so. Or at least that's my distinct impression from working at a Yahoo subsidiary at the time of acquisition by Verizon. It appeared that Tim Armstrong had legitimately convinced the top Verizon execs that a combination of AOL + Yahoo would somehow create an advertising titan capable of competing with Google and Facebook.
It's quite surprising that they went through with this, given that it's a pretty ludicrous notion: a single major brand/company comeback is challenging enough in tech, but the merger of two of them at once? There's no historical precedent for that succeeding, as far as I can think. Especially with a new name as objectively terrible as "Oath".
Internally, morale was never good. It didn't help that Tim would send out weekly all-company emails that were, at best, a nonsensical word salad of business strategy jargon straight from HBO's Silicon Valley.
Literally all of the Verizon execs who were involved with this calamity are long gone now, and Verizon's previous CEO retired in 2018. My impression is the new CEO basically just wants to focus on 5G and get rid of this mess of bad acquisitions.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is sold.
Hopefully they aren't planning to just drain hefty interest payments out of AOL/Yahoo until it goes bankrupt.
It seems like Rackspace and Cox are doing OK though, so that is a good sign?
I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but they are doing a great job of tanking it.
I've had email addresses on Rocketmail for a very long time. I always worry they will shutter this historically significant domain & email service.
One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.
Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
Yes. Just about everyone on the planet is aware that Yahoo is a cursed company that you should stay extremely far away from, but if you look exclusively at the two divisions it does well in (three if you include Japan, which you shouldn't as it's basically a separate company) then they're actually totally competent and profitable systems, which would justify this price tag on their own quite handily.
Given the recent Yahoo! Answers news, it seems like Apollo is thinking along the same lines, and are only interested in the good bits of this acquisition.
If you mean AIM, it was US-only for too much of its existence. Gamestop was pretty widespread in Europe, North America and Australia at least.
I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.
Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now that way.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
Didn it ever make a profit?
I will always remember the HuffPo homepage masthead, which showed HRC with a 98.5% chance of victory, right up until the end. Probably didn't help her situation.
I don't see any future cashflows, incomes, dividends or even any plan for foray into new business areas.
For all intents and purposes, it's a dead company.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-website...
Average Click-Through-Rate for web ads is about 0.5%.
That translates to about 20 million ad clicks per month.
Average Cost-Per-Click is about 0.5 USD, meaning Yahoo earns about 10 Million dollars from ad clicks.
Lets triple it, considering exclusive deals, ad deals, etc. So thats 30 M USD per month, or about 360 M USD per year.
Still is it worth about 5 B USD?
Also note that this is current rates. Internet is a finicky business where if you drop off the radar of the most active users, you will lose revenue very quick.
So the risk adjustment factors for companies like Yahoo will likely be very high.
Why is it important for you to call Yahoo "dead" ?
The setup page for ext access to verizon.net/AOL accounts has a verizon domain for SMTP & POP and an AOL domain for IMAP.
eg: pop.verizon.net smtp.verizon.net imap.aol.com
ref: https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-ap...
Hopefully this indicates that control over all verizon.net email accounts will fully revert to Verizon. Well, more like a blind wish. AOL mail management has been a little onerous - like mandating quarterly login to the webmail portal, else get locked out of POP access.
Still have any FreeBSD running?
Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
[1] https://vespa.ai
Vespa was extensively used for vertical search when I was there. Things like content search inside Travel, Local, Finance, Shopping, etc... was either Vespa or a predicessor. I don't think Vespa was used for the general internet search engine, but may have been used for some of the side queries that happen at the same time.
Too big to generalise. Shared tech stacks would be hard to call modern, but various tech stacks within teams were better. The more worthwhile stuff is open sourced (Athenz, Screwdriver) but there is a lot of shit internally, in varying stages of "deprecated but still the defacto solution".
> Still have any FreeBSD running?
I mean, there's probably some freebsd 7 hosts _somewhere_ and some of the internal tech stack supports it, but mostly it's RHEL6 when I left with a presumably-completed-by-now RHEL7 migration planned.
> Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
Can't comment on search, but a partner team to my old team did.