Yes. And AOL sent them all their data on these...
Posted on 05/03/2021 9:09:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
KEY POINTS
Verizon will sell its media group, which includes brands from AOL and Yahoo, to private equity firm Apollo Global Management.
The sale signals that Verizon will focus on its internet-provider businesses as rivals continue to explore media.
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Verizon will sell its media group to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, the companies announced Monday. The sale allows Verizon to offload properties from the former internet empires of AOL and Yahoo.
Verizon will keep a 10% stake in the company and it will be rebranded to just Yahoo.
The sale will see online media brands under the former Yahoo and AOL umbrellas like TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance and Engadget go to Apollo at much lower valuations than they commanded just a few years ago. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 and Yahoo two years later for $4.5 billion.
Verizon will get $4.25 billion in cash from the sale along with its 10% stake in the company. Verizon and Apollo said they expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2021.
There has been increasing evidence recently that Verizon wanted to sell off its media properties and instead focus on its wireless networks and other internet provider businesses. Last year, Verizon sold HuffPost to BuzzFeed. It also recently sold off or shut down other media properties like Tumblr and Yahoo Answers.
Before that, Verizon’s original vision was to turn Yahoo and AOL properties into online media behemoths that could take on Google and Facebook’s dominance in online advertising. Under former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, the Yahoo and AOL brands were converged into a new online media division within Verizon called Oath.
But the Oath project largely failed to gain momentum, and Armstrong left the company in 2018. Oath rebranded again as Verizon Media Group in November 2018 and was run by Guru Gowrappan. Gowrappan will continue to lead Yahoo under Apollo.
With the sale of Yahoo and AOL, Verizon signaled it is no longer interested in media, unlike its rivals. AT&T is still trying to grow WarnerMedia into a streaming competitor to Netflix and Disney, even as it struggles with loads of debt from its media acquisitions. Comcast, another internet provider, is still in the media business as well with NBCUniversal.
Verizon Media’s sale to Apollo marks the latest turn in decades-long roller coaster ride for AOL and Yahoo, two of the most dominant forces in the early days of the consumer internet. After spinning out from Time Warner, AOL struggled under Armstrong, despite making bold bets on digital media properties like HuffPost and the network of local news sites called Patch.
Yahoo endured its own struggles over the last decade. After burning through several CEOs, Yahoo tapped Google’s Marissa Mayer to run the company. Mayer made big bets at Yahoo, including reformatting its news properties like Yahoo Finance and buying the popular blogging platform Tumblr for more than $1 billion. But Mayer’s Yahoo failed to live up to her ambitions, its valuation sank and it eventually sold to Verizon.
Under Apollo, Verizon’s former media properties will be challenged to grow and become profitable in order to attract yet another sale or exit down the road.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.
I thought Apollo died in Rocky IV.
Appolo must need a tax write off. No one in their right mind would pay that kind of money for those 2 dogs.
I am shocked to see that much value in Yahoo or AOL.
I continue to use my first email address I got from Pacific Bell (PacBell) many decades ago. It has gone through many corporate upheavals with SBCGlobal, AT&T, Yahoo!, Verizon and causes me untold pain keeping it running. But it still works.
Someone paid $5B for AOL ....Wow
I thought Apollo died in Rocky IV.
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I thought AOL died.
Life comes at you fast. I’m old enough to remember when Yahoo and AOL were the 800-lb gorillas of the internet, as dominant relatively speaking as Google/Alphabet and Facebook are now. I still use yahoo daily for a mail account and stock quotes, vestiges of that earlier era.
weird...yesterday I got a notice from verizon about yahoo (or yahoo about verizon) explaining their privacy policy - which absolutely sux rocks. I turned everything off.
Drudge (I know, I know - still gotta see what the enemy is up to) is a big user of yahoo.
I thought the name rang a bell. From January...
I am shocked to see those two are still in business. I haven't received an AOL CD in the mail in years!
Yes. And AOL sent them all their data on these...
Leon Black named ‘independent’ directors to Apollo despite deep ties
I still use the Yahoo for an e-mail address...used to use the messenger for talking /video calling...back in the 90’s Yahoo was not as moonbatted out ...today it is just propaganda like 95% of whats out here in our so called news .....everything that was good about them is gone
Those two aren’t worth $5.
Yahoo! has disabled the comments to articles for several months to protect the “woke” snowflakes from dangerous ideas that conflict with their own (or the ones they’ve been brainwashed into believing).
When I first started using the internet Yahoo was my search engine. I hadn’t used it in ages.
I had a friend who BOUGHT Yahoo stock at $400/share in the year 2000.
I thought so too, for a while. Then when Verizon unloaded its FIOS business to Frontier a few years ago AOL suddenly became the service provider for my verizon.net email account.
Yet another shuffling of assets, and “rebranding”. $5 billion for both Yahoo and AOL. Somebody’s balance sheet has taken a loss ;-)
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