Verizon new Yahoo owner
Verizon and Yahoo announced today that Verizon will acquire Yahoo's operating business for "approximately $4.83 billion [US Dollar] in cash".
The acquisition marks the end of Yahoo's independence, and moves core assets under the Verizon umbrella.
Verizon, which acquired AOL last year, controls several key Internet properties already including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, and AOL.com.
Verizon will acquire the Yahoo brand name as well as core web, mobile and other products of Yahoo's operating business.
This includes Yahoo Finance, News and Sports, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, Tumblr, Flickr, and a variety of smaller properties.
Verizon new Yahoo owner
Verizon plans to integrate Yahoo's assets under the AOL umbrella. What's probably most interesting from a user perspective is the outlook for individual Yahoo products.
Will Verizon keep them all? Will some be sold to other companies, or some even retired completely?
While Verizon or Aol did not make any mention of plans to retire or sell Yahoo assets, it seems likely that the company will have a good hard look at all Yahoo properties.
One possible strategy would be to retire products that are not lucrative, not promising or simply don't match the overall strategy of Verizon's content strategy.
Yahoo Search for instance might be one of the assets that may get handed over to another company. Aol Search for instance is powered by Bing already. On the other hand, there is the matter of Yahoo's Search deal with Mozilla, makers of Firefox. Yahoo agreed to pay Mozilla $375 million per year until 2019 for becoming the default US search engine of the browser.
The contract signed gives Mozilla the right to leave the partnership in case that Yahoo got sold to another company and Mozilla would find the new owner / partner unacceptable. Additionally, Yahoo would still have to pay Mozilla the annual revenue guarantees.
It seems likely that some Yahoo products will be merged with AOL offerings. Yahoo Tech seems a likely candidate for that for instance, as both TechCrunch and Engadget operate in that niche already.
Changes
Additionally, it will be interesting to see if Verizon will announce changes for some of the products that it plans to keep. Will it change the content policy on Tumblr for instance, or merge some Yahoo platforms with platforms it already owns?
It seems likely that there will be changes for some of the products at the very least. The most likely candidates for that are products not mentioned in the press release specifically. This includes Tumblr and Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Search.
Now You: What's your take on the deal? Which Yahoo properties will Verizon sell off or retire?
In the long run I expect Verizon will sell off large blocks of the company. But in the short term I wonder what impact this will have on yahoo’s core services. They have been stagnant for a long time. Email service, for instance, has been ridiculous for years. Emails delayed for hours, horrible spam filters.
I used to love Yahoo Messenger. But Lost interest when the sex bots took over. The rest of Yahoo has always been crap.
I used to love yahoo mail until I found out that Google gave you free pop3
Thanks for the tip. I didn’t realize Google provides free pop3 access.
@ams, tmk all providers now offer free pop3, Outlook, Gmail, and even Yahoo Mail
I wonder how they are going to be moving all that cash though.
“approximately $4.83 billion [US Dollar] in cash”.
When i read in cash, i would assume it would be like paper or coins..
But when your talking about 4.83 bil.. how are they going to be doing that.
Or is this just my misunderstanding of the english language ?
Cash means they transfer the money I guess as opposed to coming to another agreement.
Opposed to transfering shares of another company bud.
You are right ;)
I hope they resurrect Yahoo pipes
Lol, never.
I’m worried about Yahoo groups. Not many possibilities outside of Facebook and if for some reason you just cannot stomach Facebook Yahoo is and has for many years been the best solution for people worldwide with a similar interest to get together. Google groups never got anywhere near as easy to manage or manuoeuvre. Hm, will see what happens but it could be the end of an era for finding help with various software and hardware.
So maybe this means AIM / Yahoo Messenger interoperability? only 18 years late… and I am not sure if many people even uses them anymore.
Yahoo Messenger is actively used by international oil traders.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-oil-traders-are-writing-love-poems-to-yahoo-1469119885
There will be a major disruption in The Force.
Incidentally, a “cash” purchase means “cash, or cash equivalent, or anything of value that can be converted on demand immediately into cash without change (gain or loss) of dollar amount”.
Incoming yahoo bloatware on all verizon phones.
Yahoo! has been on a downward slump for years. They’ve been losing money, having successive layoffs, and closing their divisions for years. I almost feel kinda bad for them, but considering that Google produces superior products (heck, I stopped calling Yahoo! a “Google competitor” a LONG time ago), this was an inevitability.
Why did Google succeed where Yahoo! failed? Simple: Google evolved, Yahoo! didn’t. Google moved beyond being a simple search engine and supplier of software services and expanded into other markets like hardware and robotics. Yahoo! never broke out of its software-only borders and suffered as a result.
I’m worried about the impact on the search engine duckduckgo. they recently ( maybe my memory fails and it happened long ago ) joined hands with yahoo to deliver anonymized search hits ( like startpage and google ). quite an approvement; but what about Verizon and privacy policy? are they to be trusted?
oops! not “approvement” but “improvement” regarding increased amount of results.
One of the main reasons Verizon wanted Yahoo was to get control of their email services. In addition to it’s branded y\Yahoo Mail, it also owns/controls the following:
@ameritech.net
@att.net
@bellsouth.net
@flash.net
@nvbell.net
@pacbell.net
@prodigy.net
@sbcglobal.net
@snet.net
@swbell.net
@wans.net
That’s a lot of new customers to sell Verizon services to.
And there is also Flickr & Tumblr photo services.
Verizon wants to move beyond it’s basic telephony service and merge the email & phone services together. Sweet move if they can pull it off.
Yahoo holds a bunch of other (vanity?) email-provider domains. I recall when, at signup, a list of about a hundred different domains were available to choose from. Idunno what’s vanity-ish about “rocketmail.com” but that’s what my kiddo chose. Today, I checked and found the rocketmail site is redirected to mail.yahoo.com ~~ something I never realized. That helps explain why the login page requires full ([email protected]) email address to be entered (years back, simply entering username would suffice. @yahoo.com was implicit, or presumed).
I wonder if all those people with Yahoo! accounts will feel comfortable with Verizon now having all their data. Verizon is a very different beast than Yahoo.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking. I’ve had my Yahoo account since 1997. It served as my primary email account for years, but I recently started using other providers. I still use the Yahoo account for spam and mailing list signups, but not much else. I also have some old photos on Flickr. Now that Verizon is taking over, I’m not sure how much of any of that I’ll want to trust them with.
I for one have been on yahoo messenger for years..and like it for its ease of use. I am not into facebook. I have a lot of friends I keep in touch with on messenger, and I would hate to lose it. I do remember the old aol, lol. I have the app on phone..but when on pc it is handy to have that old smiley face :). I hope Verizon keeps it.
Yahoo! will be renamed Oath under Verizon’s management.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-yahoo-aol-oath