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Yahoo! America Online

Verizon Sells Internet Trailblazers Yahoo and AOL for $5 Billion (apnews.com) 64

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
AOL and Yahoo are being sold again, this time to a private equity firm. From a report: Wireless company Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the once-pioneering tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal. Verizon said Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo. Yahoo at the end of the last century was the face of the internet, preceding the behemoth tech platforms to follow, such as Google and Facebook. And AOL was the portal, bringing almost everyone who logged on during the internet's earliest days. Verizon spent about $9 billion buying AOL and Yahoo over two years starting in 2015, hoping to jump-start a digital media business that would compete with Google and Facebook.
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Verizon Sells Internet Trailblazers Yahoo and AOL for $5 Billion More

Verizon Sells Internet Trailblazers Yahoo and AOL for $5 Billion

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  • 4 Billion in value was destroyed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:48AM (#61341118)
    How big was the CEOs bonus for losing the 4 billion?

    • Re:4 Billion in value was destroyed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:14AM (#61341240) Homepage

      It was never worth what they paid. The year after they bought Yahoo, they admitted as much - see Wikipedia:
      "In December 2018, Verizon announced it would write down the combined value of its purchases of AOL and Yahoo! by $4.6 billion, roughly half.[9]"

      The real question is how this division managed nearly $2 billion a year in revenue with nothing to show for it. What do they even do?

    • Re:4 Billion in value was destroyed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:21AM (#61341284)

      Further proving my theory that you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and achieve similar results.

      • I like your idea, but I don't have any 8-balls nearby. Would a shell script do? I think most of management could be scripted; actual essential jobs are the kind that cannot be done remotely.

        • I like your idea, but I don't have any 8-balls nearby. Would a shell script do? I think most of management could be scripted; actual essential jobs are the kind that cannot be done remotely.

          Considering how gung ho corporations are about automating every job they can lay their hands on, why not combine your idea with automation? Maybe make robots who run off your script [youtube.com].

          Think of how much money companies could save by getting rid of overpaid CEOs and whatnot with all the extra perks that go along w

      • Re:4 Billion in value was destroyed (Score:4)

        by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @12:07PM (#61342046) Homepage

        Further proving my theory that you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and achieve similar results.

        You go with that if it makes you feel good. I think they are more like this.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by uncqual ( 836337 )

        True - just as you could replace most lottery tickets with a piece of scrap paper and achieve similar results.

        However, people buy lottery tickets hoping to get one of the relatively rare tickets that doesn't achieve similar results as a piece of scrap paper.

        Similarly, CEOs are hired with the hope that they are significantly better than a magic 8 ball and it turns out a few are. The difficulty is it's hard to figure out in advance which ones are and in what situations they are and it's also unknown what situ

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by xalqor ( 6762950 )

      It's not the same CEO. McAdams made the 2 acquisitions. As far as the board is concerned, they expected huge returns, but it didn't work out -- must have been quite a surprise for them -- and now McAdams is already gone so Vestberg is actually *saving* the situation. They could have lost everything, but now they're only losing half...

    • It is difficult to tell.

      The brands may have lost value, but they could had got contracts and customer relations with companies were they move over to their own services which may had exceeded the 4 billion loss.

      Say you are a trucker, you buy a new Semi for 150k you drive it for 20 years and make a million dollars out of it, then you sell it for scrap for 10k. You had already made money off your investment while it had deprecated in price, you did get some cash back from it. So overall it was a win-win.

  • There is no way that this is a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by haus ( 129916 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:50AM (#61341140) Journal

    Why would anyone pay 5 billion for these dead assets?

    The idea that this was the starting point for launching a big social media effort was bad when Verizon attempted. Now it is even more laughable.

    • We'll have to see what's left after the new owners fire all the people.

      • Why would anyone still be working at these places?

        • Probably just to collect a paycheck. Is there anything really happening there outside of some paper shuffling to pass the time? The less anyone tries to do the better most likely since any changes are more likely than not to puss off remaining users.
          • I visited Yahoo in 2010. Even back then you could tell no one gave a shit about what they were doing. It's likely filled with people too lazy to look for other jobs and gave up applying to anything better a long time ago.

        • Why would anyone still be working at these places?

          My neighbor works for Yahoo.

          She is well paid. She doesn't have to do much work. Even before the pandemic, she did WFH one day a week and spent the day planting flowers in her yard.

          If you like money but don't like work and have no ambition, it is a good job.

    • There are still, unfortunately, many people / emails @aol or @yahoo

      • This does not by any means suggest that it is a good idea for anyone with a basic awareness of their surroundings to continue to work in there.

        They should get the hell out why they still have the ability to choose their own path.

        • They should get the hell out why they still have the ability to choose their own path.

          If they quit now, they walk out with nothing.

          If they stick around until the new owners do the mass layoffs, they walk out with six months of severance pay.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )
        Also AT&T still has their ISP customer e-mail outsourced to Yahoo.

    • Re:There is no way that this is a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ziest ( 143204 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:06AM (#61341208) Homepage

      Former Yahoo employee here. I was there when Marissa Mayer showed up. Yahoo BMM (Before Marissa Mayer) was a small dumpster fire, she poured gasoline and liquid oxygen on that fire. Knowing what I know about investment companies ie. Apollo Global Management, they most likely bought Yahoo for its assets and within a year will start selling off the parts. Yahoo has a big portfolio of patents which have some value, that have a big server farm, they have licensing agreements with Microsoft and, last but not least, Yahoo has significant real estate holdings in the Silicon Valley. IIRC about 25 acres with building in Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Hell, I'll bet the real estate alone is worth more that the rest of the company.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        In my experience, when you read "equity group", you know the company is boned. Those guys are not buying Yahoo/AOL for their assets. They are looking to sell off the chunks that are profitable (Yahoo Japan) or have world-class leading IP (Yahoo Answers) in any way to a much higher price tag, then move all their corporate debt to the now-exsanguinated husk, spin that off as an independent company, which will be slamming into the bankruptcy courts in a few months.

        Rest in peace. AOL/Yahoo made a lot of cool

        • [...]spin that off as an independent company, which will be slamming into the bankruptcy courts in a few months.

          I think you mean a few hours after they are spun off.

          AOL/Yahoo made a lot of cool cloud services, be it Yahoo Briefcase which never made it, just due to lack of marketing.

          Back in the day, they had a pretty robust card game site where you can play card games with others of a similar skill level. It was quite fun chatting and playing Spades or Hearts online.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          I have no fondness of AOL...I guess this is the last time I'll tell my two AOL stories.

          Back toward the end of my Commodore 64 days, right before I would buy my first IBM-compatible PC, I received an unrequested 3.5" floppy from AOL in the mail; it was for a PC and certainly wouldn't fit in my C64's 5.25" floppy drive. Then I started getting bills for using their service! I had to call and tell them 'I didn't even own a computer.'

          Years later, I was at a customer's site trying to resolve an AOL issue

      • Re:There is no way that this is a good idea (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrSpock11 ( 993950 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @12:48PM (#61342422)

        Knowing what I know about investment companies ie. Apollo Global Management, they most likely bought Yahoo for its assets and within a year will start selling off the parts.

        Sounds like you don't anything about them, but are just parroting back what the popular media tells you ("WALL STREET BAD!"). Apollo has invested in dozens of companies [wikipedia.org] and usually spends money on trying to turn the company around. That said, it is possible the companies will be sold off in pieces, but given what they are buying is still making $7 billion a year in revenue I think that's unlikely and that they believe they can grow the company.

    • And Yahoo Japan (still partly belongs to Yahoo) is very strong in Japan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Why would anyone pay 5 billion for these dead assets?

      The idea that this was the starting point for launching a big social media effort was bad when Verizon attempted. Now it is even more laughable.

      Not only did they pay $5B for it, Apollo's stock is up 13% on the news. I think we woke up in bizarro world.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        Nope, now it shows down about .025%. Guess their website is glitchy. Maybe Yahoo and AOL will fit right in.

    • They are very ill, but not quite dead yet.
      Yahoo especially has some life in it, mainly around business based news, as well AOL holds onto some nice patents that you might see come back to haunt us.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        Which patents? They sold off their patent portfolio to Microsoft and Google many years ago.

    • Maybe they need a tax write-off, to offset something else on their books?

    • Why would anyone pay 5 billion for these dead assets?

      The idea that this was the starting point for launching a big social media effort was bad when Verizon attempted. Now it is even more laughable.

      If anyone had RTFA they would have read this part:

      Verizon Media’s revenue rose 10% in the most recent quarter from the year before, to $1.9 billion. The division still has nearly 900 million monthly users, and generated $7 billion in revenue in 2020, according to Verizon and Apollo.

      These companies are far from dead. Verizon just overpaid for them and then they just failed to achieve the type of growth Verizon was looking for. 900 million monthly visits is nothing to sneeze at. With the right management they can likely increase revenues. Private equity doesn't buy companies they don't think they can make money from.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The AOL side still has a pretty robust and profitable online advertising business.

      The real mystery here is what value Yahoo! has. All I can think of is Fantasy Sports and Yahoo! Finance and I'm not sure they are even profitable anymore.

  • Who are "AOL" and "Yahoo?" Are they candy makers?

  • I remember using Yahoo hosted at Standford (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:14AM (#61341244)
    I think it was akebono.standford.edu/yahoo. Jerry's favorite web sites or something like that.

  • No way they're worth that much... it smells more like a tax break scheme rather than a shrewd business deal.

    Can't wait to see what Verizon does to scratch the buyers back in the near future.

  • More like dysentery, actually.

    • The last 15 or so years have pretty much been a long game of Oregon Trail for these guys where every crossing causes them to lose half their valuables.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by invid ( 163714 )
        There's a strategy called "Milking the Tail" which counts on this phenomenon. You buy a dying company that you figure will take a few years to fully die, and if you don't try to keep it alive you can make a profit. The profit chart will look like tail, slowly tapering down to nothing, and if you don't invest in its future, you can make more money than you lose.

        • Re:AOL a trailblazer? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:37AM (#61341764)
          Honestly with something like AOL or Yahoo trying to change or revitalize it at this point would just piss off the remaining customers who like it the way it is and haven't moved on for precisely that reason. I can't count the number of software products, websites, or other technology ruined over the years because someone had to take what was already perfectly good and completely fuck it up. Sometimes it really is just better to maintain what already exists instead of changing it to attract a new group of users.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by kriston ( 7886 )

            I recently tried out the paid AOL plan to see how things were going. The current AOL Client looks much like the old one but the services behind it are almost completely gone. The Mail window and the Chat rooms remain but everything else is a web browser window. Even the mail system is run on Yahoo's servers now.

            There's almost nothing left. You can't even send instant messages on the paid AOL service anymore.

    • As they walk along the trail, they stop every few steps to light a $100 bill on fire and drop it. They've started quite a few trail blazes doing that...

  • Internet legacy being destroyed (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:23AM (#61341296)
    Yahoo and Aol wil probably be sold from company to company for a while as more and more services get shut down. Soon there will be just the domains which will probably end up as museums like symbolics.com and altavista.digital.com. Hopefully Google.com will be a museum in another 20 years.
  • Back in the day my friends and I used to communicate primarily through AIM (especially for coordinating online games) and my main email accounts were on AOL and Yahoo. Hell, my wife still uses her AOL email account. With some effort you'd think they could have made a usable smartphone chat/social/email app that capitalized on 90s nostalgia. Maybe get MySpace into the action. Oh well. It's hard to believe that AOL was once so huge it gobbled up Time/Warner.

  • Still a decent home page / news aggregator (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:46AM (#61341398)

    I still find that (and use) my.yahoo as a decent home page and news aggregator. In one simple information dense and not full of white space page I can see the stock quotes I am interested in, the weather, and news feeds from NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, and general tech news. The UI supports 4 even width columns that you can place and rearrange whatever information blocks you want on. I have not come across better general "landing page" site that lets you generate a similar information-dense page.

    Any suggestions for alternatives? My criteria for an aggregator page is that it is information dense (have I used that term enough times?), not full of wasted white space, not annoyingly low contrast, not full of ads (or is at least ad-blocker compatible), allows feeds (RSS or otherwise) from the major news outlets, and has decent stock portfolio (and related news) tracking.

    • I still find that (and use) my.yahoo as a decent home page and news aggregator. In one simple information dense and not full of white space page I can see the stock quotes I am interested in, the weather, and news feeds from NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, and general tech news. The UI supports 4 even width columns that you can place and rearrange whatever information blocks you want on. I have not come across better general "landing page" site that lets you generate a similar information-dense page.

      Any suggestions for alternatives? My criteria for an aggregator page is that it is information dense (have I used that term enough times?), not full of wasted white space, not annoyingly low contrast, not full of ads (or is at least ad-blocker compatible), allows feeds (RSS or otherwise) from the major news outlets, and has decent stock portfolio (and related news) tracking.

      Have you considered just making your own? It is pretty simple HTML/CSS to build the framework (and it can look as good as you care to make it look) and then just plug modules where you want. I'm sure there are plenty of places which would provide stock and weather widgets and I use rss.bloople.net to put RSS feeds into my homepage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nwaack ( 3482871 )

      I can see the stock quotes I am interested in, the weather, and news feeds from NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, and general tech news.

      ...and HuffPo, In The Know, Vox, Elle, People, Esquire and whole other host of absolute garbage websites. No thanks.

      • I use yahoo for the same thing, but since they killed their comment section I definitely spend less time there. Half the point of reading about politics is to comment on it and they killed that.

        Yahoo's Fantasy football app is still cool. At work we've used it a couple years in a row and I've used it longer. Also I've had an email with them for junk for years. I have a gmail account but never use it and my important email needs are through my ISP.

        Hopefully they keep on chugging along and bring back the comme

  • They intended to compete with Facebook by shutting down Yahoo! Groups?

    No, this story doesn't make sense.

    Is this buy Intelligence-backed? This is literally twice as expensive as the new Moon colonization program.

  • Would they be interested in MySpace? And maybe AltaVista? And could they re-release the Zune?

  • How is AOL and Yahoo valued at that much? They haven't been the "in-crowd" for like 20 yrs now.

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