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Yahoo! Businesses Verizon

Once Valued at $125B, Yahoo's Web Assets To Be Sold To Verizon For $4.83B, Companies Confirm 206

The reports were spot on. Verizon Communications on Monday announced that it plans to purchase Yahoo's Web assets for a sum of $4.83 billion in cash. The multi-billion dollars deal will get Verizon Yahoo's core internet business and some real estate. The announcement also marks a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer, which once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion. For Verizon, the deal adds another piece to the mammoth digital media and advertising empire it owns. The deal is expected to close early 2017. CNBC reports: The transaction is seen boosting Verizon's AOL internet business, which the company acquired last year for $4.4 billion, by giving it access to Yahoo's advertising technology tools, as well as other assets such as search, mail, messenger and real estate. It also marks the end of Yahoo as an operating company, leaving it only as the owner of a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, as well as its 15 percent interest in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. In December, Yahoo scrapped plans to spin off its Alibaba stake after investors worried about whether that transaction could have been carried out on a tax-free basis. It instead decided to explore a sale of its core assets, spurred on by activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Forbes has called it one of the "saddest $5B deals in tech history."Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was expected to leave -- or get fired -- said she intends to stay. "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer said in a note on Yahoo's Tumblr page. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."
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Once Valued at $125B, Yahoo's Web Assets To Be Sold To Verizon For $4.83B, Companies Confirm

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:37AM (#52574113)

    There is nothing sweeter than those juicy Geocities page views. That's the crown jewel as far as I'm concerned.

  • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:49AM (#52574139)
    I don't think much of Verizon but I would be fucking shocked if Meyers arse isn't on the sidewalk 10 seconds after it goes through. Yahoo was on its way down, but she put the peddle to the floor and accelerated it into oblivion.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      It is SOP for the CEO of an acquired company to stick around for about 18 months to ease the transition. It would be a really bad sign if she wasn't planning to stick around. The kind of sign that would hurt verizon's share price.

      • Far better to take the pain and cauterize the wound than let the gangrene spread further.
    • by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Monday July 25, 2016 @08:05AM (#52574235)

      "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer said in a note on Yahoo's Tumblr page. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

      Presumably she means Chapter 11.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'm sure the participation trophy CEO will be just fine. All the people who actually work there whose lives got ruined are another story but in the US workers are irrelevant anyway to most people including other workers.

      • I'm sure the participation trophy CEO will be just fine. All the people who actually work there whose lives got ruined are another story but in the US workers are irrelevant anyway to most people including other workers.

        She probably worked something into the sale that gives her a guaranteed position at the company for a fixed term. This is very common, I have never seen a company acquired without such a deal for the executives who wanted it. And it's a pretty cushy gig, too. You get paid to watch someone else run the company while you cash checks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bearhouse ( 1034238 )

      You're right, she should go, having added no value. But I'm sure she negotiated a sweet deal with stakeholders as part of the overall package.
      (BTW, this is not an anti-fem rant; plenty of good female and bad male bosses out there, and while I'm here let me extend a hearty "fuck you" to all the SJWs trying to ruin /.)
      Back on topic, quite what she means by "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter..." one can only speculate.
      Selling the remaining minority interests they have? That'll be done b

      • Yeah, she probably has a picture of Michael Milken on a shrine somewhere, but to be fair, there's no difference between the deal she gets and the the deal the CEO always gets.
    • by cdrudge ( 68377 )

      If you quit, do you still get your golden parachute? Or is that only available if you're forced out?

      • Depends on the parachute, but it isn't unusual as part of the deal that if the board wants one sticks around exactly as long as desired and then acts like one left of ones own free will.

    • She will stay exactly long enough for her golden parachute to deploy, then she will D.B. Cooper the place.

    • by Alomex ( 148003 )

      Yahoo was on its way down, but she put the peddle to the floor and accelerated it into oblivion.

      She didn't do any worse than the previous four CEOs to be honest.

  • wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:54AM (#52574165)

    Where did Verizon find 5 billion in *cash*?? Inside the mattress??

    • Re:wait, what? (Score:4, Informative)

      by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:57AM (#52574177)

      They just hiked rates on their plans and are kicking their less profitable customers out. They haven't invested in new technology or speed increases for decades only begrudgingly implementing 3G speeds and then marketing it as 4G.

      • They probably financed with that bullshit forced sale of another router email they sent out last week. "Buy a new garbage router from us, or we'll start tacking on a monthly fee for the privilege of continuing to pass through our old one to your actual, good router."

        Fuck you, Verizon.

    • They found it in your data caps and overage fees, naturally. Where else would a telecom company go to for cash?
    • They sold their FiOS business to Frontier Communications for billions.

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      It's an expression like "film at 11" even though news stations haven't done film in decades. However, $5B in actual cash is a huge volume, a lot more than a mattress. I'm thinking the book by Bernie Rhodes "DB Cooper, the Real McCoy" talking about Richard McCoy who hijacked, jumped with $500K from a 727 but was caught few days later. His M.O. was very similar to the previous hijack by "Dan Cooper." When Richard arrived home he found it quite difficult to hide $500K, not much time to dig a deep hole or find

  • Mayer has made herself unemployable by running this company further into the ground. Obviously she is going to stay until someone gives her enough money to quit, where else would she go? Perhaps a bid for republican nomi... oh...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you.

      Ah, the old "take their eyes off the ball" trick. Don't look the Captain as the ship goes down -- think of all the deck hands who worked so hard.

    • by Malc ( 1751 )

      She's made millions and doesn't need to work. Perhaps she could go and work on being a positive parenting role model instead?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25, 2016 @08:06AM (#52574239)

    "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

    I guess she means Chapter 11...

  • The new Verizon slogan: we give you the 1990s Internet. #blinktag #dialup
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Rats. Now I will most likely have to switch. Based on my regular interactions with Verizon, I have very high confidence they will LEC the performance of the mail infrastructure.

  • I care too (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Marissa Mayer: "For me personally, I'm planning to stay, I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

    2. Marissa Mayer's salary is $117 million over 5 years; $36.6 million for first six months.

    3. For that sort of money I'd love and offer to stick around because "It's important to me" too.

    4. "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter." That would be Chapter 11, Amirte?
  • It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter

    Well I guess someone has to see it into death :P

  • Saddest = Nokia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25, 2016 @08:39AM (#52574387)

    Melissa will get a big bonus most likely paid by the new owners, because they'll have paid her a bonus to encourage her to do the deal.
    Very similar to the deal Elop got for gutting Nokia, locking it into a Microsoft world where it was doomed to fail and yet he got a big fat bonus (paid from the *merged* company, i.e. from Microsoft) for doing the deed.

    To me Nokia was far sadder, it went from the top slot in the smartphone industry to virtually bankrupt in the space of one obviously malicious CEO. Whereas Yahoo was vapour valuation to less vapour in one obviously incompetent CEO.

    http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html

    • To me Nokia was far sadder, it went from the top slot in the smartphone industry to virtually bankrupt in the space of one obviously malicious CEO. Whereas Yahoo was vapour valuation to less vapour in one obviously incompetent CEO.

      And incompetent board. Don't forget the leadership before Elop was horrendously lacking. Sure Elop might well have been a Trojan Horse, but the only reason he could do what he did was because Nokia were in such a pisspoor state by the time he arrived. They'd squandered their lead and were so far behind the times, it's plausible that Windows Phone was their only option. A terrible one, but the chances of Meego having any chance in 2010 after iOS and Android had been running riot for 3 years was pretty slim.

    • by Shatrat ( 855151 )

      Don't confuse Nokia handsets with Nokia. Nokia itself is alive and well and had about $25 billion in revenue last year. The handset business was spun off to Microsoft because Microsoft was willing to write a big check. Making money on handsets is pretty hard if you don't have either a walled garden store (Apple) or make the actual components like processors, memory, screens (Samsung). Otherwise margins are very thin relative to Nokia's actual network products aimed at carriers.

  • Near as I can tell, the only significant asset would be the personal information, AKA the email address and associated data. Is there anything else of unique value in Yahoo? What could the assets be?

    Anyway, I had been hoping that Yahoo would get desperate enough to fix their email system to try to avoid this sad ending. Nomad said "I shall effect repair", but his EQ was much higher than mine and I can't persuade anyone of any solutions, even when they are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.

  • Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.

    The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.

    And then Google came and ate their lunc

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.

      The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.

      And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).

      Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.

      More like DNS wasnt a thing in whatever world you lived in... DNS (early mid 80's) was in use far before HTTP (late 80s/early 90's) existed. The yahoo/lycos/ask jeeves sites (mid 90's) didn't exist until after HTTP was more widely used.

    • Your network stack or your ISP was defective. DNS existed on ARPANET in the 1980s, and I used fully qualified host names in the early 1990s to access hosts via TELNET and FTP before Yahoo even existed. Otherwise, you're correct.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then)

      Hard to say, would guess you are either an unemployed IT staffer or an IT Director.

    • Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.

      The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.

      And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).

      Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.

      I remember everything you said except the "access Yahoo by an IP address" (or that "DNS wasn't a thing then").

    • All of it will happen again. Before Yahoo (before the Web actually), there was a Veronica [wikipedia.org] which did a fairly reasonable job of cataloging the big gopher sites [wikipedia.org]. And before that, there was an ftp site (can't recall the name) which tried to mirror most of the content hosted on other popular ftp sites (and was eventually displaced by Archie [wikipedia.org]).

      Yahoo foundered because their core web search was built on people hand-picking what should be the best results for a search term. I remember trying to find a decent c
  • Is Marrissa selling her assets?

  • Read that again. read it good. That is insane to purchase the mammoth company that is yahoo to increase the activity of AMERICAN ONLINE. Jesus Tap Dancing christ M. Myers should never get into a management position ever again if the best hope for your company is to be a feeder into AOL...
  • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday July 25, 2016 @12:15PM (#52575737) Homepage

    So Verizon bought AOL, and now they're buying Yahoo. What's next? Are they going to buy Compuserve, Prodigy, Lycos, or Excite?

    But really, what's the plan here? I find it a little frightening that Verizon's strategy seems to be to acquire whatever large content sources they can get their hands on. They (and Comcast) have given some indications that they'd like to leverage their control over infrastructure to push their own content and services.

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      AOL had already bought the consumer-facing side of CompuServe back in 1998. The networking side went to WorldCom. Both AOL and WorldCom are part of Verizon now.

      SBC (now called AT&T) bought Prodigy in 2001. Ybrant bought Lycos. Excite.com is owned by IAC.

  • In cash to by a worthless piece of junk. Yet also has money to fight the FCC to avoid any hint of being fair to consumers, keep other companies off their "turf" and so forth - can't even let you have a set top box they don't get rent on - they'll die. Yet they can afford this loser?
  • WOW! So now Verizon owns both AOL AND Yahoo... The 1990's called. They want their technology back!

    Though likely the most valuable assets were the 15 percent interest in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, what's left of the Yahoo user base, and the real estate (which was probably all purchased at the height of Yahoo's value)...

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