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Yahoo! Businesses Verizon Technology

Verizon Says Yahoo Name Isn't Going Away (cnet.com) 27

Verizon is treading carefully with Yahoo, but still wants to seal the deal. From a CNET report: "The deal makes strategic sense," said Marni Walden, the executive vice president of business innovation for Verizon and the person who pushed for the acquisition. "We won't jump off of a cliff blindly." She continues to believe there's value in the Yahoo name, noting that it won't go away if Verizon completes its acquisition. Brands like Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance still draw plenty of eyeballs, and offer the kind of audience that Verizon and AOL lack, she said during a keynote session at The Wall Street Journal Digital conference on Wednesday. Her comments come just weeks after Yahoo disclosed a 2014 breach exposed at least 500 million accounts, making it the worst hack in history. Shortly after, reports found that Yahoo had participated in a government program to sniff user emails, further eroding trust. Verizon said this all had the potential to cause a "material impact" to the deal, which could mean Yahoo takes a reduced price or the deal falls through altogether.
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Verizon Says Yahoo Name Isn't Going Away

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  • by dejitaru ( 4258167 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @03:56PM (#53157355)
    IF this merger happens I really want to see what they do with their email and IM portions of AOL and Yahoo. If they merge it under one of the names or keep it separate. Yay finally interoperability between yahoo and aim! (not like I use them or know anyone who still does)
  • by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @03:57PM (#53157361)

    Take a nice big bite of that turd sandwich and smile like you love it!

  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @04:07PM (#53157433)

    While myself like a lot of people had moved away from Yahoo, it wasn't from disgust like I had with other site, but more to the fact that other sites just did the job better for me.
    The Yahoo Name isn't unredeemable however it will take a while to get the users back. And they have to be more than on-par with their competitors they will need to be superior.

    • I agree with your sentiment, but not your conclusion. That is, Yahoo doesn't inspire disgust or outrage for me. I don't hate Yahoo the way I hate some companies. The feeling that Yahoo inspires in me is something more like, "meh." It's the site that was part of the early web, and then became one of those lame portals, along with such stellar inspirations of "meh" as AOL and MSN, that you might find some piece of semi-malware switched your homepage to.

      However, I don't think that means the brand is worth

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        To add to this I think there is a valid question of demographics as well. Advertisers want young people with disposable income for the most part. What is the average age of Yahoo!'s audience? I bet it skews older now. I mean who created yahoo mail accounts after Gmail was available without an invite?

        • To add to this I think there is a valid question of demographics as well. Advertisers want young people with disposable income for the most part. What is the average age of Yahoo!'s audience? I bet it skews older now. I mean who created yahoo mail accounts after Gmail was available without an invite?

          We're told that young people don't have disposible income. While old, I have quite a bit.

        • Advertisers want young people with disposable income for the most part.

          They do?

          Young people tend to either be flat broke, or rather savvy to attempts to rip them off, especially internet advertising. Young people are far more likely to use ad-blockers. Old people are not; they're more trusting and easily taken advantage of. That's why they even have laws designed to protect against "elder abuse". Advertisers would do much better targeting the old folks who use Yahoo Mail.

      • Maybe I'm wrong. I know people have a good association with Yahoo Finance. Do people still use Yahoo webmail or Yahoo Messenger? Is Yahoo Answers used for purposes other than trolling? Are there other services that are popular that I've just lost track of?

        I use some of the Yahoo groups. After Usenet collapsed the Yahoo groups filled in and added some file storage ability. It also offered the ability to moderate people who were assholes or got hacked for having lame passwords. That is actually a rather nice service.

        Yahoo Sports is actually a professional and nice alternative to the Walt Disney version of sports, ESPN.

        Now that being said, on all of the news type pages, fully half of the news links are of the Taboola clickbait variety. Completely worthles

      • nine-times makes some excellent points.

        My first thought was that Marni Walden, the executive vice president of business innovation for Verizon has no business innovation left, so is resorting to spending boatloads of money on buying stuff in a bid to gain "market share" or whatever.

        This is what C level idiots do when they have no idea. Also just because Marni thinks the brand has some value (or is at least saying that in public) does not make it true, or even believable.

    • I ditched Yahoo in general because I was pretty unhappy with their support. The site had lots of circular links that seemed focussed on preventing you from actual contacting them for an issue not described on the site.

      Yahoo Finance is the sole remaining Yahoo product I use.

  • Can't imagine why they wouldn't want to retire the Yahoo brand when they can use a name like Verizon that's associated with stellar customer service and value.

  • So Verizon now has both AOL and Yahoo! ??? Why do they want/need both?
    • by xlsior ( 524145 )
      So Verizon now has both AOL and Yahoo! ??? Why do they want/need both?

      They live 20 years in the past, as proven by their broadband offerings as well. What's the most delusional about this takeover is that Verizon's main goal of the takeover is to leverage yahoo and almost double their customer base to 2 billion in the next 4 years. Neither Verizon nor Yahoo has a good track record attracting or retaining customers any time there is even a glimmer of choice involved, and they don't exactly have a captive
      • I don't know about where you live, but where I live (a more rural area about an hour from DC), Verizon is king, as it is in most rural areas I know of. Verizon has, hands-down, the best cellular coverage in rural areas. Of course, they also have the very worst service, and the most astronomical prices. But people in rural areas happily pay it because they're unwilling to put up with less-than-stellar coverage from the other telcos.

        Personally, I have a Sprint phone with Ting and it works well enough. I'm

    • So Verizon now has both AOL and Yahoo! ??? Why do they want/need both?

      It's like how some people want herpes and gonorrhea, kind of a pick-your-symptoms thing.

  • "We won't jump off of a cliff blindly."

    Full quote:

    "We won't jump off of a cliff blindly, we'll do it with our eyes wide open, as has been the tradition at Yahoo for some time."

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