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Comment by 9front | Hacker News Reader

"Apollo to Buy Yahoo, AOL From Verizon for $5 Billion" from today's edition of WJS.

How could Yahoo possibly be worth that much money? It certainly not worthless, Yahoo still have great brand, nostalgic even. $5 Billion is a bit of a strech though.

The sale also includes AOL, and brands like TechCrunch and Engadget.

Still not sure it adds up to $5 billion, though.

Perhaps the sites are only valuable as a bundle?

The brand value of both AOL and Yahoo has to add up to something, but TechCrunch and Engadget is most likely just thrown in for free to get rid of both sites.

On its own I believe that Yahoo Finans could be a profitable little site.

Techcrunch/Engadget came in to Verizon with AOL, and the media sites (well those that Verizon hasn't sold off seperately over the years) are a big part of the value bundle for Verizon Media. Having just the sites without the adtech business means you're losing money running the sites, having the adtech without the sites mean you don't have a guaranteed anchor inventory.

Yahoo still ranks very high on Alexa. At 11, it's above Wikipedia(12) and just one position below Amazon (10). Reddit is at 19. Microsoft is at 21

https://www.alexa.com/topsites

There are certainly sites that many assume must have totally faded away years ago that are still floating around.

The one that gets me is Second Life which was such a hot thing for an instant in time and is still, amazingly, around even though I haven't heard anyone mention it for years.

Anecdotally, I use Yahoo Finance daily and Yahoo News (they have decent business stuff sometimes) a couple of times a week.

Yahoo Finance is a great product.

Yahoo Finance I could see be a successful stand-alone product/company. It's not a billion dollar company, but perhaps a $50+ million. Sadly I don't think many in Silicon Valley is interested in being an company of that size.

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