The future of Yahoo's Web Properties
If there are not any last minute changes, the last days of the once-mighty Yahoo company have begun.
Verizon offered $4.8 billion for the Yahoo brand name, core patents, and the bulk of the company's Internet properties, and Yahoo accepted the offer last year.
The only major properties not included in the deal is the stake in Yahoo Japan, and the stake in Chinese company Alibaba.
All other web properties will be part of Verizon once finalized. The following Yahoo properties will fly under the Verizon flag from that moment on:
- The main Yahoo Portal and Search Engine.
- Major Yahoo services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports.
- The photo community Flickr.
- The blogging platform Tumblr.
- Any other Yahoo property that is not Yahoo Japan (Yahoo Travel, Yahoo TV, Yahoo, Shopping, Yahoo News, Yahoo Music, Rivals.com, Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Advertising, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Developer Network, Yahoo Homes, Yahoo Groups and others).
What happens to those properties?
All these properties will fly under the Verizon banner after the finalization of the deal. But will all survive the integration?
Verizon's plan, most likely, is to place core Yahoo properties on the same level as AOL in the company's hierarchy. While it could move Yahoo under the AOL brand, the other option seems more likely at least in the beginning.
That does not mean that there won't be any mergers. While services like Flickr or Tumblr will likely live on in one form or the other, the same cannot be said for smaller Yahoo properties.
Verizon may look for synergies between properties, and there are plenty. Aol maintains two tech blogs and one general news blog for instance. Then there is AOL Mail, and AOL Search, and entertainment and lifestyle services.
Yahoo News could be merged with the Huffington Post, Yahoo Mail with AOL Mail, Yahoo Search with AOL Search, and so on and so forth.
While there will certainly be mergers, some Yahoo properties may also be closed down completely. This would not be the first time that relatively popular web properties are shut down and redirected to others.
Remember AOL shutting down Download Squad and several other properties in favor of the two big properties Huffington Post and Engadget? The same could happen again.
There will probably be changes to properties that keep their independence as well. Considering that the migration is even bigger than that of AOL a couple of years ago, it seems likely that it will take some time before we know more about Verizon's plans with Yahoo.
Now You: What's your take? Which properties will be merged, which shut down?
They’ll change name and will free mail still be there?
Nothing pleases me more than seeing Yahoo have problems. Shame on them for what they did to Geocities.com. :(
Ouch – you kept that grudge for a long time! :)
So long as they leave Yahoo Finance as it is, I really could’nt care less about the other branches. YF is second to none. Google Finance pales by comparison.
The only Yahoo! service I use is Flickr. Generally speaking, of what I notice with sites under the “AOL control” is that they are leaders of the ads/tracking band (‘Huffington Post’ i.e. is overcrowded). Basically ‘Verizon’ isn’t attached to a Pavlovian smile reaction here so I believe I’ll omit do dig any further in its new toys than I did with Yahoo!
Is this the same Verizon that got caught with ‘supercookies’?
Will Tumblr still be around?
So Big red gets another media venture like Go90 in order to build up content delivery network
James T: Not supercookies per se (that name is already taken by something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercookies#Supercookie), and not zombie cookies [or evercookies see Samy Kamkar] but yes, they injected Unique IDs into Headers .. called X-UIDH ( see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh ) .. for mobile HTTP traffic [they could not modify encrypted traffic eg HTTPS] .. this was in the clear and anyone collecting traffic could track you (eg NSA etc) not sure why they call it a perma-cookie .. its a string in the header .. anyway EFF do a good job explaining it :)
How Yahoo came up with its new name — Altaba
Elizabeth Dwoskin – The Washington Post
January 10, 2017
Yahoo was already a shell of its former self. Now part of the company is getting an obscure new name: Altaba.
When Verizon agreed to buy the company for $4.8 billion in July 2016, it planned to purchase just Yahoo’s core Internet businesses, which include its email service, sports verticals and various apps. What’s left of the embattled technology company would essentially be its ownership in the very valuable Chinese Internet giant Alibaba.
When the deal closes, the remaining part will change its name to Altaba, the company announced in security filings on Monday. The sale is expected to be completed by late March.
The new name is meant to be a combination of the words “alternative and Alibaba,” according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who didn’t want to be named because the individual was not authorized to speak on the record about the name change.
Today Yahoo owns roughly 15 percent of Alibaba, holdings that are worth about $35 billion. The idea behind the name is that Altaba’s stock can now be tracked as an alternative to Alibaba because Yahoo owns a sizeable chunk of the Chinese company.
The new company, which will be publicly traded and until now has been referred to as RemainCo in security filings, also owns a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, the company’s Japanese affiliate, and Yahoo’s cash, and a patent portfolio that is being sold off in a separate auction.
A Yahoo spokeswoman, Suzanne Philion, would not comment on the name. She emailed the following statement: “We are confident in Yahoo’s value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-yahoo-new-name-altaba-20170110-story.html
I lost all faith in Yahoo once they deleted inactive ymail accounts. I have many mail accounts; I don’t care if I don’t access one of my mail accounts for over 4 years, that doesn’t give them a right to delete it – especially considering it’s a security hole. I’ll stick with gmail, because Google doesn’t delete inactive gmail accounts, no matter how long they’ve been inactive for. Whether I don’t use my email for 1 year or 10 years, I expect to be able to login and access my emails from 10 years ago.
You should give a try to ProtonMail, if/when you intend to switch. Interface is very similar to Gmail except it’s super encrypted and cannot spy on you.
You can set your Gmail to forward emails there if you want a slow transition.
They never delete accounts either.
https://www.protonmail.com
That could become terrible news, in the grand scheme of things.
Telecom/ISP companies are very powerful and central to the internet and the digital age. If they started absorbing major search engines, billion users mail providers and other internet giants, we’d be getting really close to an oligopoly on the entire internet. Terrible that would be.
The upside is that it’s going to be difficult to swallow other giants, so this concentration may not happen fast enough for it not to be counteracted by other important changes in the landscape.
Still, an oligopoly is one possible future for our internet. A web in which what is possible or not possible is entirely constrained by the chess game between a dozen giants or less. (The death of net neutrality would be one nice illustration of what I mean; only laws can protect the web from these kind of market evolutions in coming decades)
Smartest move Yahoo ever made was investing in Alibaba. I’ve seen conflicting numbers, but from what I’ve read Alibaba is at least as big as Amazon, and I’ve seen numbers that suggest Alibaba actually dwarfs Amazon.
It’s hard to get reliable financials out of China, but I think it’s safe to say Alibaba is like Amazon in Asia and Malaysia.
Regards,
Mr. Joey
1999 I remember well when aol took over & killed netscape (now sort of firefox). Netscape was the best browser at the time.
sad to see so now must find another e mail service I trust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
Ya Who? :)
My current Yahoo! account is my Windows account for logging into Windows 8.1. Now that the company is changing its name to Altaba, will I have to change it, or I won’t have access to my computer? If so, how long do I have before I have to change it? I have an Outlook account that I am thinking of switching to, or maybe I could create a Gmail. How do I change that for my Windows Login? Do I first need to turn off needing a password to login to Windows? If so, how do I do that? Let me know. Thanks!