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.
This has to be some sort of money laundering deal. With all the RATs now firmly in league with human traffickers expect more stupid seeming purchases.
Good one!
Still using up your free coasters from AOL?
“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.”
My wife and I have siblings, who in the last year went to Yahoo as their primary internet.
We have tried to warn them.
Is there a way to get a copy of their privacy policy?
Thanks
Yes I remember that one, along with Alta Vista and web crawler
Yahoo survives because between it and Goggle it was the lesser of two evils. Though they’ve been closing that gap, most notably when they turned their comments off before the election.
The Comments were the best part, there’s no reason to read the articles as they are full of useless propaganda.
Nor I - had to starting buying paper targets. :-)
LOL! They weren't even good coasters - not at all absorbent, and would scratch the wood.
And I barely recall that Rush Limbaugh used Lexis Nexis way back in the 90’s.
I went searching for more info on that. Didn’t find what I was looking for.
It took an hour to download the contract, using a 2400 baud modem.
AOL has a lot of servers and many folks still use a verizon.net address that AOL manages when Verizon stopped hosting it’s own e-mail services; many verizon folks had their emails switched to AOL servers and these folks were allowed to keep their verizon.net addresses. I wonder if a lot of email users are going to lose theirverizon.net email addresses if AOL shuts down or wants a pay service model for each address.
I still have an AOL email address and have no plan to change.
Nobody is looking at AOL users as worth hacking!
A bunch of stupid people running Yahoo over the years...!
How did Yahoo! fall from $125 billion to $5 billion in 15 years?
https://www.zeebiz.com/companies/news-how-did-yahoo-fall-from-125-billion-to-5-billion-in-15-years-4200
Yahoo! had the opportunity to buy Google for a paltry $1 million in 1998.
The opportunity came back in 2002 but Google’s $5 billion price was too high for Yahoo!.
Reports suggest that in 2006, the company came very close to buying Facebook for $1 billion. The deal didn’t go through.
Ouch.
I hope that every writer loses their job at Yahoo.
Miserable people who condemn America and conservatives all the time plus they cannot even get any video to play most of the time. Get rid of any kardashian stories too!!
The new owners need to bring back the comment section.
I remember using scroogle until google killed it off.
You don’t even know what a write off is. But they do and they are the ones writing it off.
“Someone paid $5B for AOL ....Wow”
“It took an hour to download the contract, using a 2400 baud modem.”
With someone sitting at the computer to click the 5 minute pop ups or they would be disconnected and have to start over.
There is still a market for plastic drink coasters and insecure email services?
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