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Microsoft May Help Finance Yahoo Buyout, Says Report 29

Posted by msmash from the what's-next-for-Yahoo dept.
Microsoft is in talks with equity firms that are considering making bids for purchasing Yahoo. The company says that it is willing to offer a significant financing for their efforts, reports Kara Swisher, who has a commendable track record. Swisher, however, adds that Microsoft is yet to make any commitments so far to investors. From her report at Recode: Microsoft wants to ensure that if Yahoo is sold, whoever buys it will be a good partner going forward. That makes sense, since Microsoft has close search and advertising ties with Yahoo, part of a longtime partnership. Many don't realize this but, Yahoo still has a number of web properties that are churning a lot of cash. According to web traffic monitoring website SimilarWeb, Yahoo website, for instance, alone is visited about 6.7 billion times every month. That's a lot of money in the advertising world. According to a report, Yahoo also recently got serious about advertising on Tumblr, one of the most popular blogging platforms. The company is considering a deal with Facebook to allow the social juggernaut to run ads on its network. Then we have popular photo storage and sharing service Flickr and also Yahoo's investment in Chinese technology conglomerate Alibaba. Although Yahoo has lost its "charm" over the years, it is still a pretty major company. For Microsoft, which has purchased a number of startups in the past two years, putting money in Yahoo could eventually turn out to be a great deal.
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Microsoft May Help Finance Yahoo Buyout, Says Report More

Microsoft May Help Finance Yahoo Buyout, Says Report

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  • It seems the only reason MSFT would do this would be for brand recognition and/or giving folks a shinier golden parachute.

    I can count on zero hands the number of times I've been to Yahoo in the past decade.

    • It seems the only reason MSFT would do this would be for brand recognition and/or giving folks a shinier golden parachute.

      Maybe they don't want to see the collapse of such a well known player that could weaken confidence in the industry. Perhaps they want to ensure that Google doesn't buy Yahoo as they might prefer to compete with a number of smaller companies than a single, ever-growing giant. Or perhaps they are doing the same thing when they invested in Apple when everyone predicted that they company little chance of surviving (whoops; that backfired!).

      If Microsoft needed the Yahoo brand recognition then they would buy the

  • I barely tolerate Yahoo "as is". I definitely move my web hosting off Yahoo if MS buys them.

    Anyone got any good recommendations? (Require: Fast FTP, email aliases, just basic storage)

  • I just don't get it. I still use the my.yahoo.com custom homepage now and then. Yahoo mail is fine but I moved most of my mail to gmail way back when. Yahoo sports is big.
    I am pretty sure they are still making a profit so why do people seem to dislike them so?
    And yes they used to run way too many ads.

    • I don't think it's "hate" so much as feelings ranging from "indifference" to "disdain" coming from the geek crowd. How to describe... I think these days Yahoo is sort of the Wal-Mart of the online world, except it works better if you imagine them as a sort of incompetent, once-successful-but-now-failing Wal-Mart. I'd be sort of embarrassed to have a yahoo.com e-mail address, because it announces to the world that you're not at least savvy enough to get a free gmail account.

      I'm curious, why did you switch

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

        Gmail was much better.
        I actually have a gmail, yahoo, company, and outlook accounts. I like to try new stuff and frankly I was really interested in gmail when it came out and I got an invite so I used it.
        I use my yahoo for throwaway accounts.
        I use outlook for professional emails.
        I use gmail now for friends and family.
        I stopped using Yahoo a lot when they dropped the directory. I used to find it fun to drill down and find interesting websites. Sure now I can do a search but it is not interesting. For example

    • > I just don't get it.
      That's because you don't manage multiple domains. Uploading files is D-O-G slow. I get ~130 Mb/s down, ~12 Mb/s up (bits) which is 16 MB/s down and 1 MB/s up (bytes) and it STILL takes ages to upload anything. Other sites upload wicked fast.

      > Yahoo mail is fine
      Maybe for you. But it blows for multiple reasons:

      0. Ad spamfest
      1. For the rest of us searching still sucks compared to Gmail. (Their Javascript rewrite was horrible for months: slow, crappy UI, etc.)
      2. Their offline mail

  • How about undooing a few yahoo properties that they bought up and mismanaged, turned my "lifetime of upgrades" purchase of Musicmatch into another music company called eMusic and told me my "lifetime subscription" would need to be repurchased? Like hell. I bought winamp instead. I knew it would only be a matter of time before I will finally have to give up my yahoo email preference too. Dang anyone know of a good webhosting service overseas?
    • Did you also buy a "lifetime membership" in a health club, despite the well-known fact that all "lifetime membership" organizations change their name and invalidate all existing lifetime memberships every couple years, as a deliberate part of their business plan? Shame on you, my friend. Anybody that buys a "lifetime" subscription to anything on line knows in advance their access will only continue as long as there are other fools buying more subscriptions.
  • If Microsoft buys Yahoo, I'm closing my paid for Flickr account.

  • Apparently someone from Microsoft's PR firm posted this "story." Yahoo owns Tumblr.

    Remember this?
    https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    Remember what happened next? New Board of Directors
    https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
    Who, just so happened made decisions where Microsoft was the winner. So, they went from a "meh" search company busy doing other stuff to "blech" re-wrapped Microsoft tech.

    I think they are left with some kind of content generation things that are making money. Maybe fantasy sports or something?

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