Feels like a lateral move motivated by money and perhaps boredom. Interesting too to contrast Tinder with Bumble which is founder led and growing. Mature stagnant shuffling companies CEO, you can see clearly that the energy is gone.
It's worse than stagnant. I don't get why Verizon paid 9B for Yahoo and now is just selling it for 5B. Perhaps there's some bizarre finance logic behind it?
But wouldn't it have been better for Verizon and now Apollo Global to invest in fresh stuff instead of the VERY CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED DOWNWARD SPIRAL of the Yahoo brand? Did Verizon actually intend to revive the brand? It doesn't seem they did. Nor does Apollo Global which, it appears, are just a bunch of bankers.
They look to be little more than a news aggregator at this point, so it's just eyeballs from the inertia of users' force of habit to use Yahoo?
I suppose this gives a "life span" of, at most, a few years before the lights get turned off at Yahoo.
I left Yahoo in 2011, but back then, profit margins were usually OK but not nearly as good as competitors. Mostly properties were run by small teams but competing ok against much larger dedicated companies. And then there was search; outsourcing it mostly to Bing but keeping a large team and crawling infrastructure to do customizations didn't make sense to me, but it's what happened.
I don't know how much of the small team enabled by corporate stuff + central advertising team still works at Yahoo, if it's still there, maybe there's hope.