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Yahoo! America Online Businesses Verizon

Yahoo Is Yahoo Once More After New Owners Complete Acquisition (theverge.com) 79

Yahoo and AOL, formerly known as Verizon Media, have officially been acquired by their new owners and renamed as simply "Yahoo." The Verge reports: Verizon announced it was selling the properties to Apollo Global Management in May in a deal said to be worth $5 billion, around half of the nearly $9 billion the telecom giant originally paid for them, and a fraction of the hundreds of billions the two companies were worth at their peaks.

Yahoo will now be run by CEO Guru Gowrappan, and will operate as a standalone company under Apollo Funds. Apollo is a private equity firm that owns assets like crafts retailer Michaels, Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. "The close of the deal heralds an exciting time of renewed opportunity for us as a standalone entity," Gowrappan said. "We anticipate that the coming months and years will bring fresh growth and innovation for Yahoo as a business and a brand, and we look forward to creating that future with our new partners."

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Yahoo Is Yahoo Once More After New Owners Complete Acquisition

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  • Meh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Thursday September 02, 2021 @06:08PM (#61758027) Homepage
    Yahoo, meh, who cares?
    • by Anonymous Coward
      But are they keeping the logo that former CEO Marissa Mayer designed? That's the important thing.
    • Indeed, Yahoo is now less popular than men's double luge or Perl.

    • Right. Yahoo was mildly useful as a search aggregator until Google came along, then there was no need to ever visit Yahoo again.
      • Yahoo finance is still pretty good as well as their fantasy football interface. Other than that, it's pretty useless.
        • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

          Agreed on the finance, though they've managed to make it worse recently. As they've done with much of their other content.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I preferred AltaVista. I tried Yahoo, but it never found what I was looking for. (I see, though, that they've been bought by Yahoo, so they're probably useless now. But Google became more useful anyway. I just wish it could do more logic conditions.)

      • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        Except that myyahoo was useful as a portal page until iGoogle came along, and then went away. Oh, and As of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.

        • How many active users, though? Some of those 225 million users are accounts that have been ignored for years in favor of other addresses, or ones that were started just so people could use Yahoo Groups which is now defunct. (After a while Yahoo just about forced you to create a Yahoo mail address to participate in Groups even if all of your groups were actually subscribed to a different email address.)
        • Though there is another group of active users, or at least were for a while. Verizon discontinued their own email services and moved all verizon.net addresses to AOL Mail, though customers got to keep their email addresses. AOL Mail is now itself an alternative front end to Yahoo Mail; the back end handling was merged in 2018. I don't know whether they plan to continue that or are going to make further changes to Verizon email services.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yahoo! Finance is by far the least-awful news source for business news, especially stock market news. Everything else presents the perspective of the 1% as if it was fact.

      • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        It was until they started wanting people to pay for "y!Finance+" to get what they used to get for free.

        • https://www.yahoo.com/plus/fin... [yahoo.com]

          You're whining about data for a script, not about the news service.

          There are lots of available data providers, and if you're actually a stock trader you shouldn't complain about having to pay a small fee for that data. Doesn't your brokerage provide data for when you're looking something up by hand? If you're not making enough money to pay for your script's data, you have no business leeching that much data anyway.

          • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

            I love how you call a factual statement whining. They used to provide a ton more news for free...FACT. It used to be great because you could get all the news in one free location. BTW, we're paying for it with all of the ads. And yes, I've been trading since '82.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      NBA, Toyota, Comcast, CBS, customer, health, etc. care. :P

      • by ukoda ( 537183 )
        NBA? Sound like some USA sports. Toyota? Another has been company. Comcast? Guessing it is another USA ISP. CBS? Guessing a USA TV company. Sounds like another whole lot of who cares... ;-) Wake me when something I care about is on Yahoo.
  • Click on a news article, get the first screen, hit space to scroll, and it goes back to the main page.

    Click on a news article, get the first screen, figure out where to hit space to scroll, text fades halfway down with a box "click to continue". Which takes you to the original story.

    Click on a news article, scroll past the video, see a video sidebar with a huge X over it, hit the huge X, back to the main screen.

    Seriously, if yahoo finance wasn't so convenient I'd never visit the site again.
    • Every mouse sold today has a scroll wheel. I have no idea why you initially use the mouse to click a link, then switch to the keyboard to scroll, when you have a wheel right there at your fingertips.
    • Yahoo Finance is probably the crown jewel of the Yahoo brand. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the main reasons that Apollo bought it.

  • Did they drop the ! from the name? Maybe I'm having a Mandela moment and am just imagining this, but I'm sure it was always Yahoo!
  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Thursday September 02, 2021 @06:16PM (#61758043)

    But the news that you get once you exit from mail in particular suck. Clickbait headlines, clickbait summaries, you click and you get presented a couple of paragraphs, then are asked to click again. Worse than Microsoft news that you get once you exit outlook.

    Having said that, Yahoo finance, yahoo mail, and some of the news properties they got via AOL are interesting for a sort of recovery.

    • It's all about fantasy sports (yay NFL time) and sports betting. That's the most important part of their entire portal.

      • Fantasy sports, finance news. Those are the two things that people use Yahoo for still.

        So it's actually kind of a good fit for a private equity firm that owns a massive Vegas casino property (Venetian / Pallazo in a very prime location in the middle of the Strip).

        If you don't think that Yahoo isn't going to leverage that fantasy sports synergy into a sports gambling play, you're crazy.

    • But the news that you get once you exit from mail in particular suck. Clickbait headlines, clickbait summaries, you click and you get presented a couple of paragraphs, then are asked to click again.

      Yes, a lot of clickbait headlines. And auto playing videos. Ugh!

      To avoid having to click multiple times to read the full news story, I always "Open Link In New Tab" when clicking on the story title. That takes me directly to the full article.

      Worse than Microsoft news that you get once you exit outlook.

      Having said that, Yahoo finance, yahoo mail, and some of the news properties they got via AOL are interesting for a sort of recovery.

      If it wasn't for Yahoo Finance, I wouldn't be using Yahoo at all.

      I feel it's still one of the better sites for following financial news, stocks, and charting.

    • Yeah it's a site with a lot of potential, but really needs to be cleaned up. I would be happy to have a credible alternative to gmail as a mail service, for one.

    • by yagmot ( 7519124 )

      Yahoo USA should look at Yahoo JP for some inspiration. Yahoo JP absolutely crushes it, and their weather and transport apps are second to none. Their maps app is really good too; it shows more detail than Apple or Google maps, especially in certain locations like parks or gardens.

  • How long before the new owners start looking for someone else to unload it on?

  • Yahoooo!
    Almost as annoying as the Aflac commercials.
  • by Mal-2 ( 675116 ) on Thursday September 02, 2021 @06:56PM (#61758113) Homepage Journal

    If Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon were the only names they had to choose from, I'd say they ran with the least hated one. Good job guys!

  • whenever I think of Yahoo, (which is damned seldom), I'm always reminded of AOL. The only thing Yahoo is missing are those shiny polycarbonate coasters.

  • by kriston ( 7886 ) on Thursday September 02, 2021 @07:47PM (#61758233) Homepage Journal

    Even AOL email is now run on Yahoo servers.

    There's practically nothing left of the legacy AOL. Even the AOL Client is just a facsimile of the olden days. No Buddy List or Instant Messaging, just the ability to use a telephone modem.

    • A neighbor still uses AOL, and even worse, insists on using the AOL Desktop program. It's really nothing more than a web browser that opens all the windows for you... (email, home page, buddy list, etc.). I think she uses it just so she can hear "Welcome. You've got mail!"
      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        No buddy list anymore.

        It's actually pretty easy to use, and the integrated mail feature and chat are things users have always really, really liked.

        Just don't visit any of the chat rooms unless you like your @aol.com address getting spammed the shit out of.

      • I'll admit I made my phone's email notification AOL's "You've got mail!" because why not. AOL never made an Amiga client, so ran it via a software B&W Mac emulator on my Amiga, those were the days.

  • someone else trying to lose a few billions?

  • A conjioned pair of former tech giant husks is worth $5B to someone.

  • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday September 02, 2021 @10:00PM (#61758409)

    Yahoo: shagged, fagged and Marissaed

  • I am continued to be amazed at how Americans reward CEOs for atrocious waste of capital, in supposed exchange for short term profit, which cannot recover the lost capital.
    • There's another way to look at it: not being beholden to the sunk cost fallacy.

      That previous valuation is over and gone. Current management has shown an inability or disinterest in turning it around, and decided it's time to get any residual value out while they can, and stop dumping money down the rathole of historic value. The other option is to shut it down and liquidate the hardware.

      Personally, I think they went for a pretty good choice - let someone else try and turn it into something of value, while

  • Yahoo's sole value is in the brand. To people here on /. it's a piece of Internet history, to the muggles it is still a strong brand despite not actually fronting any sort of meaningful business (right now).

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Per my longer comment, I think the residual value is the personal identities linked to the Yahoo email addresses. The brand value of "Yahoo" is lower than that of "the former guy".

      However the nuisance value of Yahoo spam email remains big as it ever was. As in negative bigness.

  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Friday September 03, 2021 @04:52AM (#61758903)

    I never agreed to Verizon's new terms of service for Yahoo Mail and just clicked "later" or bypassed it some other way every time they displayed it.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Ditto. Per my longer comment, do you know of anyone who has actually read the new ToS and explained the worst parts?

      But now I'm wondering what you think you are winning?

      Seems to me that Yahoo has become a sunk cost for all of us and we are all bleeding any time Yahoo consumes. The only potential value I can think of is that I may need to unlock an old account somewhere, where the account is linked to Yahoo email. That's predicated on the theory that I've suddenly decided that the information on that Yahoo-l

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