OT-Verizon Purchases Yahoo

[AshSaturday]

Verizon is purchasing Yahoo for 4.83 Billion. Could be veryv interesting in long run.

 

[RU4Real]

This seems like wasted money to me. Yahoo doesn't have any unique property that I'm aware of and their reputation for poor security is going to cost Verizon another billion dollars on top of the purchase price.

 

[mdk02]

As long as we can keep those NCAA March Madness pools that went through Yahoo I'm fine with it.

 

[Retired711]

Verizon still owns AOL, right? So couldn't this be an attempt to combine AOL and Yahoo to build a competitor to Google and Facebook?

 

[RU4Real]

Verizon still owns AOL, right? So couldn't this be an attempt to combine AOL and Yahoo to build a competitor to Google and Facebook?

In theory, yes... But both brands (AOL and Yahoo) have serious drag. The entity would have to be rebranded, in addition to the massive technical overhaul that would be required. I don't see a successful strategy, here.

 

[lighty]

In theory, yes... But both brands (AOL and Yahoo) have serious drag. The entity would have to be rebranded, in addition to the massive technical overhaul that would be required. I don't see a successful strategy, here.

Yahoo still reaches over 105 million unique visitors each month and is a top 10 US website. Now imagine every Verizon user seeing Yahoo News as their news, maybe weekly email news alerts... just the yahoo mail service alone is quite valuable.

"Together they will have more than 25 brands, including Yahoo Mail, Flickr and Tumblr as well as AOL's Huffington Post and Techcrunch news sites."

They should be able to create a pretty strong ad network with those properties. Google will still be #1 by a mile, but Verizon can be a very important player across websites. Facebook hasn't yet created an ad network outside of facebook that I'm aware of, so while they are either #1 or #1b, this is something different.

 

[RU4Real]

Yahoo still reaches over 105 million unique visitors each month and is a top 10 US website. Now imagine every Verizon user seeing Yahoo News as their news, maybe weekly email news alerts... just the yahoo mail service alone is quite valuable.

"Together they will have more than 25 brands, including Yahoo Mail, Flickr and Tumblr as well as AOL's Huffington Post and Techcrunch news sites."

They should be able to create a pretty strong ad network with those properties. Google will still be #1 by a mile, but Verizon can be a very important player across websites. Facebook hasn't yet created an ad network outside of facebook that I'm aware of, so while they are either #1 or #1b, this is something different.

Yahoo news I'll give you. Their finance portal is quite good.

Yahoo mail is the playground of hackers and 419ers. Absent a huge remediation spend, it's a liability.

 

[Crazed_RU]

Verizon still owns AOL, right? So couldn't this be an attempt to combine AOL and Yahoo to build a competitor to Google and Facebook?

Would have been an awesome strategy in 1999.

 

[RU85inFla]

Would have been an awesome strategy in 1999.

There was no Verizon in 1999. LOL.

 

[oldman87]

An obvious attempt to eliminate competition for AOL.

 

[iReC89]

$9.2 B cash for AOL and Yahoo? - maybe the strikers had a point.

It seems that neither ever closed old email accounts. Hopefully Verizon realized that when they counted subscribers.

 

[Abro1975]

Verizon doesn't make a lot of mistakes.

 

[Proud NJ Sports Fan]

Yahoo is trash

 

[Turn234]

As an aside:

"Yahoo! Inc.’s Messenger has for almost 18 years been the default communication tool for the men and women who each day move billions of dollars’ worth of crude oil and petroleum products around the planet. From Singapore to Rotterdam, daily deals are pitched, contracts negotiated and global price benchmarks assessed on the chat service...

In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil transactions, compliance departments are also trying to figure out what to do. None would speak on the record, but executives from firms including Trafigura Group Pte and Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. said they also were searching for a chat platform to replace Yahoo in the event the old service were to disappear.

...From traders to refinery managers, pipeline operators and harbor masters, many even have their Yahoo IDs printed on their business cards."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...y-be-the-only-people-who-want-yahoo-to-thrive

 

[saran]

Verizon doesn't make a lot of mistakes.

They do on their website. Verizon has the worst website I've ever had to use. I stopped using it because it kept asking me to reset passwords (like 5 times in a row o) and wouldn't let me edit card info. I tell Verizon peeps on the phone about it and they agree with how bad it is (and they also agree the voice recognition system for service calls is also useless). The webiste tries to do too many things and feels like a Mt Everest of spaghetti code that needs to be nuked. Not sure Yahoo can help them there.

I can see Verizon helping Yahoo. 90%+ of Verizon's profits come from wireless - exactly the area Yahoo went down the tubes (they never made transition from wilting desktop scene). Verizon has wanted to sell off FiOS for a long time.

 

[Abro1975]

Verizon stock has improved 38% for last five years . Not bad.

 

[DJ Spanky]

I find this really funny, as in 2008 Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion.

 

[Scarlet_Scourge]

I heard that their next steps will be to buy Myspace and and bring back Geocities.

 

[RUtix4me]

I find this really funny, as in 2008 Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion.

Firstly, I am surprised no one here has noticed this is the just the online properties. Market Cap for YHOO is still $36 bln based on the ownership of Alibaba just mentioned above. It is a far cry from the $100 billion valuation in 2000 though.

A bad story but not $44bln to $4 bln......

 

[cubuffsdoug_rivals]

I find this really funny, as in 2008 Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion.

Yahoo had some missteps over the years.

1) 1998 Yahoo refuse to buy Google for $1 million. Google owners wanted the money to go back to grad school.

2) 2002, Yahoo realizes its mistake and attempts to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wants $5 billion. Yahoo says no again. How do you go from $1 million to several billion in 4 years? Damn fools at Yahoo.

3) 2008 Yahoo refuses to be sold to Microsoft for $40 billion.

4) 2016 Yahoo sold for $5 billion to Verizon

 

[wicker]

hope they bring yahoo games back

 

[mal359]

FWIW, this sale doesn't include Yahoo!'s stake in Alibaba. That's where the money is.

 

[zgoru]

Verizon has the worst website I've ever had to use.

DITTO!

I tried to set up an online payment to them on my bill's due date and because the day I was trying to set it up was more than 14 days away from the due date, it wouldn't let me do it. For ten minutes I thought I was entering the date in the wrong format, LOL.

 

[Turn234]

Firstly, I am surprised no one here has noticed this is the just the online properties. Market Cap for YHOO is still $36 bln based on the ownership of Alibaba just mentioned above. It is a far cry from the $100 billion valuation in 2000 though.

A bad story but not $44bln to $4 bln......

True...Following is from http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ya...t-does-nothing-2016-07-25?link=MW_latest_news

When Yahoo Inc. officially becomes a part of Verizon...it will leave behind a “company” with no workers and no product. Yet this entity, which doesn’t even have a name yet, is worth more than six times the amount Verizon is paying for the internet portal that web users have known for decades.

The rest of Yahoo is made up of its Asian assets — a roughly 36% stake in Yahoo Japan and 16% equity stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. — as well as $7.1 billion in cash, a large portfolio of patents, certain minority investments and its convertible notes. Considering Yahoo’s market cap at the close of trading Monday, after Verizon said it would pay $4.8 billion for the core business, was more than $36 billion, Wall Street appears to value these assets at more than $30 billion.

 

[DJ Spanky]

So Mayer is gonna end up with $219 million for her four year stint in driving Yahoo! down. Nice.