Verizon: Yahoo Finally Bought Over By The Big Internet Firm

• gmposts


• 26 Jul 2016

US Internet Giant Firm Yahoo Finally acquired by One Of The Major American Telecoms Player, Verizon Communications For A Price In The Region Of $5bn (£3.8bn) in cash.

Yahoo would now be combined with AOL, another faded internet star, which Verizon bought last year after AOL drastic drop in the market.

The deal does not include Yahoo’s valuable stake in Chinese firm Alibaba which is a stand alone company and would not be taken over by Verizon.

The price tag for the deal is well below the $44bn Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008 or the $125bn it was worth during the dot.com boom.

Verizon said the deal for Yahoo‘s core internet business, which has more than a billion active users a month, would make it a global mobile media company.

Yahoo Timeline: Their Financial Stand Since 1994

• 1994 Yahoo – which stands for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle – is founded
• 2000 Yahoo valued at $125bn at height of dot.com boom
• 2002 Google rejects a $3bn bid from Yahoo
• 2008 Microsoft’s $44.6bn offer for Yahoo is turned down
• 2013 Blogging site Tumblr acquired by Yahoo for $1.1bn
• 2015 Yahoo makes net loss of $4.4bn
• 2016 Verizon agrees $4.8bn deal to buy Yahoo

Yahoo Analysis: By A New York business correspondent Michelle Fleury

While this is a sad day for Yahoo – as big as Facebook and Google in its prime – it raises interesting questions about its new owner. What are Verizon’s ambitions?

Beyond the talk of becoming a global media company, Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdams wants a larger share of the booming digital advertising pie. And he thinks this deal will help him.

Regarded as a leading US mobile phone network, Verizon already had a wealth of data from smartphone users that it could mine.

Its purchase of AOL a year ago for its programmatic advertising technology allowed it to leverage that more effectively. Yahoo, meanwhile, has struggled to build its mobile advertising business. Its appeal is that it has content.

With Yahoo, Verizon gains the internet company’s 600 million monthly active mobile users, as well as its email service, Yahoo Finance, and Tumblr, which is popular among millennials.

So the question is, is Verizon ready to take on the likes of Google and Facebook? In 2015, these two tech behemoths claimed the largest share of the digital ad market. Whether or not Verizon can challenge that remains to be seen with Microsoft also in the mix – but that’s certainly the idea and he way to go.