23 ms·

Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

308 points by mishftw 5y ago

StratusBen 5y ago
I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars. Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.
- dgfitz 5y ago
  That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS space I think they would do even better.
  - exogeny 5y ago
    They did. Yahoo!’s DFS product is a dismal failure.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to use them ...
    - 0xy 5y ago
      Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.
      - menzoic 5y ago
        I thought trending feed was based on metrics
        csunbird 5y ago
        Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented manually from entering the trending feed as well.
        ecommerceguy 5y ago
        Hence the finger on the scales. It would be naive to think Twitter doesn't have shills that troll here to downvote anti-twitter posts such as the one above. edit: lol case in point. I once tried twitter advertising and it was the worst ad spend ever.
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have evidence of abuse, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you have no specific evidence, then posts like this are not allowed. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
        HappySweeney 5y ago
        "Cocaine" trends every Saturday early morning, leading me to believe nobody has their thumbs on that particular scale.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition. The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money". Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
    - StratusBen 5y ago
      I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
      - mssundaram 5y ago
        Certainly not all of them. Edit - do you not consider Warren Buffet a conservative investor?
        nappy-doo 5y ago
        Or your definition of conservative is different from OP's.
        ketamine__ 5y ago
        Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs, market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article written by Vitalik Buterin.
        ineedasername 5y ago
  - slg 5y ago
    >Yahoo sports apps I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
    - spullara 5y ago
      I looked this up. The top 2 are DraftKings and FanDuel. They have 90% marketshare. Yahoo is tied for 3rd.
      - StLCylone 5y ago
        Source? Just want to read about it myself.
        spullara 5y ago
        https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/North-America-Fantasy-Sports-Market-Growth-Trends-COVID-19-Impact-and-Forecasts-Report-2021-2026-Featuring-DraftKings-Fan-Duel-Yahoo-Fantasy-Sports-CBS-Sports-ESPN---ResearchAndMarkets.com https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/Nor...
      - slg 5y ago
        I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
        spullara 5y ago
        You're thinking share of users I think rather than share of revenue. But happy to be proven wrong with some other numbers.
- the_local_host 5y ago
  Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance. It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.
  - schnevets 5y ago
    I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.
    - spenczar5 5y ago
      Conflict of interest in what sense?
    - kreeben 5y ago
      Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
  - amoorthy 5y ago
    Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
    - ConceptJunkie 5y ago
      Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily, and just kills them, even if they are popular.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so I don't think it's particularly important (to them). Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    > Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation? A lot of it is about presentation. Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room. A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products. But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.
- basch 5y ago
  I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news. Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street. And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes! I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
    - basch 5y ago
      AIM was killed as well.
  - jijji 5y ago
    Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.
- berkes 5y ago
  That market is quite busy, though. I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
- zaidf 5y ago
  I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
- mmaunder 5y ago
  Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their paid products - that could have been an amazing business for that division. But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board. Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.
- u678u 5y ago
  There that horrible feeling when sometimes you search for a stock on Yahoo finance and it sends you out into the regular Yahoo search. WTF.
- nate-t 5y ago
  Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    It's intermittently posted around the web from time-to-time. There's an anonymous answer from a Yahoo employee on Quora here from 2015 that says $150M: https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.
spamalot159 5y ago
Why would Verizon want to keep a minority stake in Yahoo? Seems useless to me.
- rvnx 5y ago
  Yahoo has large and growing customers (example: DuckDuckGo)
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    What is DuckDuckGo buying from Yahoo? I was under the impression that both search and ads has supplied by Microsoft.
    - fumar 5y ago
      Who does Microsoft partner with for ad monetization? Verizon Media
      - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
        But still how does that make DDG a Yahoo customer?
        utopcell 5y ago
        DDG was a collection of perl scripts around Yahoo BOSS (Build You Own Search Service), which is now backed by Bing. Nowadays, DDG has vastly outgrown its original serving by adding their most crucial ingredient: Privacy FUD.
        mrweasel 5y ago
        That still doesn't really answer the question of how DDG is a Yahoo customer. BOSS is dead, and replaced by an ad program, which DDG doesn't use.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left; rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her vision. Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm. As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Similar things have happened elsewhere in the media world. I've seen some of them first-hand within the org. It was hard to watch a 100-year old magazine of note continuously stretched to its possible thinnest by the parent company because the returns were not what they blindly promised and seemingly wanted to reduce the price of the properties to make a sale cheaper. Thankfully in that case the company who purchased the properties is actively working to bring them back to their former selves.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  I went to HuffPo just now. It appears to be same sort of stuff from years ago. HuffPo never had the rep of a shining beacon of journalism or even integrity. Didn it ever make a profit?
  - oaththrowaway 5y ago
    No, it was bleeding money for a long time. They had to essentially pay Buzzfeed to take it off their hands.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Very similar to the Tumblr situation.
- 5y ago
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left; rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her vision. Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm. As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is sold.
nerdkid93 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024376
acheron 5y ago
"My name is AOL Time Warner, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair." Nothing beside remains.
- nolok 5y ago
  Hey come on that's unfair, the jokes on that one will forever remain in the history books
- ethbr0 5y ago
  There's two dead companies in that title, and the only live one owns content. Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Didn't you, historically, want to be the person selling shovels?
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Depends on how close you were to the 1800s -- widespread steam power & hydraulic mining. Mining shovels became worthless. People who owned exploitable resources continued to make money. (Also, denim)
      - deeblering4 5y ago
        It's a figure of speech. "Shovels" being the tools, e.g. shovels, hydraulic equipment, etc.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        Point being that "shovels" change. Everyone always wants water or gold.
    - lanstin 5y ago
      Is that Cisco or Sun in this analogy?
perardi 5y ago
From the article: …“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.” They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion. I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair. Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to keep ahold of the sports bits of Yahoo, which are seemingly popular. (Perhaps that’s why they even managed to get $5 billion for…what does AOL do?)
- itsbits 5y ago
  AOL has adtech advertisers setup with some large customer base probably 3rd or 4th to Google/Facebook. It also owns publishers like HuffPost, TechCrunch etc.
  - perardi 5y ago
    Well when your large customer base leads you to a $5 billion writedown and a public confession that Google and Facebook are eating your lunch… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon-takes-massive-billion-write-down-its-media-business/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon... …color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
    - itsbits 5y ago
      They had good customer base initially. AOL has done so many acquisitions for like Adaptv(video advertising platform), Millenial Media(mobile advertising) etc which were pretty successful. Later ofcourse Yahoo. Failure started coz they platform integration plan didn't work as expected. Lot of talent from the acquisitions left. They still use lot of old tech setup for advertising, web platforms. In summary, they failed in making a single platform from acquisitions they had.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Writing off $5B means a ton of money for Verizon. Right there we can see they already didn’t actually lose half of their investment spend. Most people’s lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had to go with a different ads biz model to not directly compete with the big two. It doesn’t stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I’m hedging 6th in case there’s some one else between Microsoft and Amazon.
fumar 5y ago
I can’t find information on how Apollo Group runs it’s PE portfolio. I assume they will eliminate costs and merge businesses where it makes sense. The press release mentions brick and mortar opportunities but Apollo doesn’t own major brands outside of Sprouts and GNC. It sounds like another miss for Yahoo again.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I believe Apollo has a big stake in several casinos. Yahoo’s sports/fantasy data is probably their most valuable & viable site. The regulatory environment surrounding online gambling, sports gambling, and daily fantasy gambling in particular has been changing rapidly and, despite being well situated from a technology standpoint, Yahoo hasn’t made much of an effort to capitalize on it. I’m guessing Apollo plans to find a way for the Yahoo sports data to work with their casinos to get on the legalized gambling gravy train.
yalogin 5y ago
This was never in doubt. Everyone knew this was going to happen. Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it? I have a feeling this is some kind of tax avoidance scheme. Knowing nothing about taxes and accounting I will let knowledgeable people correct me.
- debacle 5y ago
  With AOL and Yahoo and all the pieces, there was definitely a value play here. Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute that.
- mfer 5y ago
  Yahoo is still in wide use by people and AOL owns a number of properties and has a decent ad business. It may be that these companies were trying to extract value from them. This happens a decent amount these days. It's less about salvaging a brand.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    I still use Yahoo Finance. Not extensively, but I haven't found a site I like better for getting random stock quotes & sifting through lightweight financial information.
    - blaser-waffle 5y ago
      Yeah same. They have an API that is fairly consistent for stock stuff. If you're gonna do deep diligence there are better tools but for sniffing around, yeah they're good.
  - treesknees 5y ago
    In the past few years I've come across several businesses (landscaping, home repairs, etc.) that have been communicating with me using Yahoo email addresses. Many people forget that Yahoo mail was the "Gmail" of its time, and many of those users are still around, especially non-tech oriented users and businesses who have no incentive to switch to anything else.
bdcravens 5y ago
"This next evolution of Yahoo will be the most thrilling yet" I'm very skeptical about that claim.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ strikes again:)
- soco 5y ago
  "thrilling" as in "causing great emotional or mental stimulation" could mean actually anything, like pondering where you could quickly move your decades of stored emails...
- lfowles 5y ago
  Turn it back into a curated online directory :)
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    This would actually get me back to using Yahoo. I hope someone that can do it is reading this.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  You should take into account the meaning of “thriller”.
- DogOnTheWeb 5y ago
  Especially since it's coming from the guy who just sold Yahoo, and he's not going with it.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Considering that that's the only part of the memo they quoted, I imagine the rest of it was even more vague.
ncmncm 5y ago
In other news: somebody thought they were worth a positive number.
oaththrowaway 5y ago
Yahoo employee here... AMA
- jason2323 5y ago
  How do you feel about this whole thing?
  - oaththrowaway 5y ago
    I'm not going to stick around
- Avalaxy 5y ago
  What does Yahoo do nowadays?
  - oaththrowaway 5y ago
    Lots of stuff.. Finance is huge, Mail, Sports, Techcrunch, Engadget... Plus the Edgecast CDN and video platform service (VDMS). Was honestly hoping Verizon would keep those so I wasn't lumped into the Apollo sale.
    - basch 5y ago
      That was the most surprising part of this for me. Edgecast/VDMS would make more sense elsewhere than Apollo, like at .. Verizon, or Google.
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  Is Yahoo hiring? How's the pay? I think it'd be kind of fun to work for a zombie Web 1.0 giant in a weird sociological way. My first email address was @yahoo.com -- thank you for losing/forcibly deleting all my embarrassing teenage missives.
  - oaththrowaway 5y ago
    They are hiring (though I suspect this will make recruiting harder), pay is good. Not FAANG good, but Bay area good.
eric__cartman 5y ago
I've been waiting for Yahoo to finally die for a decade now.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I haven't heard of anyone using yahoo for anything except to check ticker prices in years.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    My "junk" e-mail address is a yahoo address. I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      Ah, that's actually a significant loss. It's quite useful to be able to search for when you signed up for X or Y years ago. Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now that way.
      - Workaccount2 5y ago
        Yeah recently I had to replace the HID bulbs in my motorcycle. The Amazon ones were junk so I wanted the same ones I originally bought 11 years ago. Sure enough there was the email from 2010 and the company still had the same bulbs.
    - infinityplus1 5y ago
      Just import all emails from Yahoo to Gmail/Outlook. They provide importers.
  - Taylor_OD 5y ago
    A lot of people use it for fantasy sports because... I'm not sure why but they do. Also its impossible to set up email forwarding with them so I have a very old email address I keep active.
soco 5y ago
They definitely squeezed a better deal than with the sale of Tumblr last year (which went for 3 mere millions)
- throwaway_kufu 5y ago
  At that price I’m surprised some crypto millionaire/billionaire or hell at this point an NFT artist didn’t just buy it as a joke, tokenize it and flip it for profit. It may sound like a joke or sarcasm but it’s not, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we see this AOL/Yahoo turn into some type of crypto play that can be marketed on the back of the old brands.
  - daveevad 5y ago
    Maybe Apollo plans on meme-stonking YHOO?
    - throwaway_kufu 5y ago
      I do get the feeling of an underlying crypto play marketed on the old brands AOL/Yahoo. I didn’t even think about something as simple meme stonk. It may sound like sarcasm and a joke, but look at the meme stonks or Doge ($11B+ market cap)...sure the kids on tik tok might not know what yahoo or aol are/were but that actually makes them fresh to the new generation, mixed in with a little nostalgia from those slightly older that would love to jump on the next rocket going to the moon...it’s seriously just 1 Elon tweet from a doubling in value.
      - soco 5y ago
        I don't know what "meme stonking" means, can you please direct me a bit as I don't get anything meaningful from Google?
        robjan 5y ago
        It's basically doing what happened to AMC and GameStop a couple of months ago
throwaway088 5y ago
Before people go all ballistic, please remember that yahoo and AOL make $700 million from Mail and a billion dollars from search. AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts(for older people though). So the sale price is approximately two years of revenue. Apollo is getting it cheap!
- perardi 5y ago
  “AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts” Do they really? I am not being sarcastic. I cannot find a recent reference to this (everything seems to be from 2015), but given my experience getting my aunt away from AOL email: it seems horribly plausible.
  - runako 5y ago
    > https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new "If you're interested in purchasing a plan that includes dialup service, please call 1-800-827-6364 (Mon-Fri: 8am-12am ET; Sat: 8am-10pm ET)" I would not be surprised to learn that they still have millions of dial-up customers & millions on the new non-dialup plans.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Is dial-up even usable nowadays considering how heavy webpages have become?
  - throwaway088 5y ago
    You have to read financial reports of aol if you can get hold of it. AOL doesn't want this info to be too widely known. Then all the old people will realize they are paying $25 per month for something that they can get for free!
  - perardi 5y ago
    Ah, and here, a source! https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-still-pay-for-service-but-not-for-dial-up-internet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s... As to dialup itself… “The number of dial-up users is now “in the low thousands,” according to a person familiar with the matter.” …but, yeah, it seems 1.5 million discerning customers are basically paying for AOL mail. “There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private.” Which: nice business if you can get it.
kolbe 5y ago
Is this the final blow for Yahoo!'s finance API?
- airstrike 5y ago
  Why would it be final? It seems to be quite successful, and any new owner would want to keep it that way
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    Acquisitions often result in downsizing, aka "rightsizing" due to newfound efficiencies and synergies.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Right, and they presumably do that to create value rather than destroy. How is that going to hurt Yahoo Finance again?
      - kolbe 5y ago
        There is zero upside to the free public API as far as I can tell. Granted it's low cost to keep it up, but it's not generating any revenue.
        airstrike 5y ago
        It is generating revenue if it attracts customers to the paid tier.
kumarvvr 5y ago
I still think Yahoo is not worth 5 billion. Sure, it makes some revenue from mail and ads, yahoo mail is essentially the AOL of our generation. Ppl hanging onto it and the new kids dont even know about yahoo.
- utopcell 5y ago
  They made $1.9BN just this quarter.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    Do you have their annual statements? I could not find any beyond the 2017 sec filing. Yahoo has been only marginally profitable for many years now. I don't see any future cashflows, incomes, dividends or even any plan for foray into new business areas. For all intents and purposes, it's a dead company.
    - utopcell 5y ago
      Yahoo is the 8th most visited property in the world [1] and still brings in billions in revenue. Pretty good for a "dead" entity. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-websites-in-the-world/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-website...
      - kumarvvr 5y ago
        As per your link, Yahoo has about 4 Billion monthly visitors. Average Click-Through-Rate for web ads is about 0.5%. That translates to about 20 million ad clicks per month. Average Cost-Per-Click is about 0.5 USD, meaning Yahoo earns about 10 Million dollars from ad clicks. Lets triple it, considering exclusive deals, ad deals, etc. So thats 30 M USD per month, or about 360 M USD per year. Still is it worth about 5 B USD? Also note that this is current rates. Internet is a finicky business where if you drop off the radar of the most active users, you will lose revenue very quick. So the risk adjustment factors for companies like Yahoo will likely be very high.
moron4hire 5y ago
I'll buy Yahoo. I got <checks wallet> $48.67. But when I buy it, I want to be CEO. Don't worry, you only need to pay me half of what you paid the previous CEO. I promise I will only devalue the company by half as much as any other selection for CEO you already have. Think of it! That's 4x the value!
nolok 5y ago
> Verizon [...] combined [Yahoo] with AOL under the umbrella Oath. Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.
elliekelly 5y ago
I wonder what Apollo's due diligence team found on Yahoo Answers that necessitated shutting it down in order to announce the deal.
- evanelias 5y ago
  I doubt it was anything specific. The simple combination of "user-generated content platform" and "hadn't received any staffing support for many years" means it's a huge potential liability for abuse claims, copyright infringement, etc.
benpink 5y ago
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oaththrowaway 5y ago
Yahoo employee. AMA
- the_snooze 5y ago
  How is babby formed?
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Who will be hosting verizon.net email accounts, held by Frontier customers?
  - oaththrowaway 5y ago
    AFAIK, those are still managed by Verizon
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      They are managed by AOL now. Access is thru mail.aol.com. Will they return to Verizon?
      - oaththrowaway 5y ago
        That's interesting. As far as I understood AOL mail was handled by Yahoo at this point.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I haven't seen any indication that Yahoo handles AOL mail but I don't see internal stuff. The setup page for ext access to verizon.net/AOL accounts has a verizon domain for SMTP & POP and an AOL domain for IMAP. eg: pop.verizon.net smtp.verizon.net imap.aol.com ref: https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-applications-to-send-and-receive-my-verizon-net-mail https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-ap... Hopefully this indicates that control over all verizon.net email accounts will fully revert to Verizon. Well, more like a blind wish. AOL mail management has been a little onerous - like mandating quarterly login to the webmail portal, else get locked out of POP access.
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m4rtink 5y ago
Does this include Yahoo Japan or is that already a separate entity? Yahoo is BIG in Japan, with Yahoo Auctions being what Ebay is in other countries.
- syntheticnature 5y ago
  Yahoo Japan has long been a separate entity.
- zkid18 5y ago
  Yahoo Japan is a Softbank-owned co
ksec 5y ago
A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article. If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me. Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )
- dweekly 5y ago
  The reason why they are heavily marketing their mmWave 5G is because they are charging an additional $10/mo/line for access and implying (falsely) that most folks with a modern phone will experience a much faster and lower latency connection at most times. In truth, consumers will only be able to connect to the mmWave network on a handful of outdoor street corners in a few metros - the frequency band (60GHz) does not effectively penetrate walls so you're not going to get it indoors. "Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from. So - mostly it's fraud.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - adrr 5y ago
    They have deployed a bunch of mm towers in the metros. LA went from a few blocks to having widespread coverage since last summer. Still not worth the extra $10 a month and the reduction on battery life. I have my 5G disabled. 5G ultra wide is only useful for home internet as a replacement for cable based internet.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    I got the impression the primary use case for 60GHz was large sports stadia.
airstrike 5y ago
My first reaction is that this is really good for everyone. For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious. For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimately have a better home than being the ugly duckling in Verizon's portfolio. For Apollo, the benefits are obvious. There's probably lots of operational improvements to execute on, again due to the fact that Verizon was likely not really focused on these businesses. Presumably the fund will reap huge returns if they can deliver on these improvements and exit successfully and timely. ––– EDIT: There is one more nuanced question I forgot to address: is this "really good" for the employees to? On an individual scale, probably not. I'm sure many people will be let go once Apollo is at the helm. But from a broader view, it is arguably "good" for everyone collective in the long run. Verizon really can't do much with the asset, so the alternative to selling is letting it wither away in the hopes of some miracle, with the more likely outcome being that Yahoo and AOL would become even worse shadows of their former selves with each passing day. Eventually people would be let go anyway and those businesses could be shut down unless some miracle strategic buyer (i.e. not a private equity owner) came along and bought them. But most strategic buyers are not comfortable buying bad operations and turning them around. They find it too risky, so that's usually a job left to financial sponsors like Apollo who are built for that. In fact, these days most PEs are not even interested in turning operations around because they also find it too risky—and sponsors learned they can make more than enough money by just being great at finding sub-scale / non-core assets, putting them together in a "platform" and selling them to another sponsor or exiting through an IPO.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Do you really believe Apollo won’t gut up Yahoo and AOL or some other situation where any leftover spirit of the entities isn’t mostly gone? This is better than remaining with Verizon since they don’t want to deal with such small stuff. Here’s hoping things end up better for assets.
  - airstrike 5y ago
interestica 5y ago
What part of this article or headline (or this sale in general) suggests "turning focus to its 5G network"?
- Macha 5y ago
  Verizon's marketing has been "5G, 5G, 5G". Verizon Media was the one part that was not so obviously linked to 5G. Their other two segments, residential and business, could clearly sell 5G to customers. So by ditching their non-ISP division, it's a focus on their ISP business, which is gungho on 5G.
crmd 5y ago
I hope this is the beginning of the end of phone companies expanding into being mass media companies.
lbsnake7 5y ago
Can someone help me understand this from an investment perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup their investment through dividends and such over the last 25 years to justify that market cap? Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Holding those names was an investment failure, as was holding the majority of tech names at that point in history. Trading those names, on the other hand could be lucrative. A friend of mine paid cash for his college education and his car by playing Hand, the maker of palm pilots.
  - reiichiroh 5y ago
    Handspring?
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      Presumably. I miss my Visor, tbh.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy, putting it lightly. All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all. Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market. Secondly, that five years down the line, there is someone else who is willing to pay for the shares at a premium of what they have originally purchased for. Now what about those who are buying 5 years down the line? They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money. And so on and so forth. So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits. Can everyone get their worth from the shares? Not at once. Not in a hurry.
ppetty 5y ago
I used to work at Aol, and it doesn’t surprise me that some significant number of people still use dial up. Not because they’re “trapped” but because that’s the only choice in some parts of the country. According to Pew, 3% of us are on dialup & more than twice that use no ISP (maybe that 7% just uses their mobile access?). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americans-use-dial-up-at-home/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americ... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americ... … I’m not sure, but it seems plausible that if 3% had to use dialup 100% of those are on Aol (who else offers dialup?). So there’s probably a lot of money to be milked from that cash cow; along with their other ad & publishing businesses.
- sida 5y ago
  Your 3% number is from 2013 though
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I looked up the Census numbers last year, and for my county it's something like 17% of people have no internet access -at all-. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on a cell phone. And this isn't exactly the boonies. It's a county with over a million people in it. Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  I think it's incorrect to just associate AOL with dialup. AOL still exists as a web "portal" and more importantly as an email service. My parents (90's) still use AOL email, and have done so for over 25 years now. They used to use dialup, but now are on high speed internet (cable), using just the web interface for the email. For their sake at least, I hope it doesn't go away any time soon. It works for them very well.
jugg1es 5y ago
As someone who came of age during the 90s, I am amazed at how little this story matters in terms of real-world impact now.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  This was already becoming true by 2005. Dialup was in decline, and Google was beating Yahoo.
- floxy 5y ago
  I had to look up whatever became of CompuServe and Prodigy. Interestingly enough, it looks like Prodigy was acquired by Yahoo in 2001 and CompuServe was acquired by AOL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
271828182846 5y ago
Repacked suprime mortgages all over again ...
- oblio 5y ago
  Have you looked at AOL and Yahoo financials before saying that? I think both are profitable.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
I have my main mail domain linked to a yahoo mail address since 1997. If it goes down .. I'm seriously f**d.
tmaly 5y ago
I have had yahoo email addresses since the late 90s. What is going to happen now?
- utopcell 5y ago
  You will continue to have Yahoo email addresses for the foreseeable future.
js2 5y ago
> For Apollo, it’s an opportunity to further invest in the digital media space — an industry it has already put money behind with deals for Shutterfly, Rackspace and Cox Media. Cox Media was my first employer (it was called Cox Interactive Media at the time), Verizon Media, my current employer. At the time, I was on the team that ran CIM's web farm which hosted the web presence for all of Cox Enterprises' newspapers, TV, and radio stations. It was a couple dozen Sun Ultras with content on NetApp filers. We ran the farm from Atlanta and connected to it over frame relay. We were colo'd in a datacenter in Sunnyvale. We were a few racks. Yahoo had a presence in the same DC. It was a room or two, PC's running FreeBSD and also quite a few NetApps. The biggest spike in traffic we ever saw was when the Starr Report was released. A couple years later, I was working for Loudcloud, now living in Sunnyvale. Visiting another datacenter, I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Fir... Today, I work as part of the mobile tools team for Verizon Media. The product I'm responsible for is hosted in a combination of AWS and Verizon Media datacenters. In some ways, there's been a lot of changes over the years, but in other ways, not so much. What I used to run on Solaris, today I run on Linux, sometimes on a VM or in a container, but sometimes still on a dedicated server. What I used to code in Shell or Perl or C or Java, today I code in Shell or Python or C or Java or Go or JavaScript. What I used to package into RPMs, today I package into docker images. Databases are still databases. SQL is still SQL. Application servers and web servers are still application servers and web servers. The web is still the web. Input still can't be trusted. Buffers still overflow. Applications still crash. Same shit, different day.
- gkolli 5y ago
  love this perspective! thank you for sharing your experience across the changing (or not-so-changing!) web landscape!
- rasz 5y ago
  >I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence: sidenote: Despite the appearance those werent random consumer motherboards. Supermicro P6SBM.
georgeecollins 5y ago
Verizon held Yahoo / AOL for about five years, they were bought at different times. ATT bought Time Warner a little less than three years ago. I think it will take longer for them to give up on that, but I bet they will start selling it (in parts) in three to four years. I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but they are doing a great job of tanking it.
grumple 5y ago
This could be a steal IF Apollo can fix the management and leadership issues at both companies. There's a real opportunity with both companies - both have pretty high revenues to only go for 5B. If you can cut down on operations cost OR use the ops cost to create more revenue, you can turn garbage to gold. They have a large number of engineers at both companies - I have to believe that with this number of engineers, you can find ways to make money if you get management under control.
Animats 5y ago
Good. Large companies should not both be in both transmission and content. It's a conflict of interest. Remember the "zero rating" issue for cellular.
bearcobra 5y ago
I wonder how things would have gone had Microsoft been successful in its acquisition of Yahoo. The value of the Altaba assets don't make the offered price seem quite so crazy in retrospect.
irrational 5y ago
Wait, AOL is still around? What do they do these days? Does anyone here work for AOL?
- r0m4n0 5y ago
  Do not work for AOL but know that their email service is still heavily used. I have a family member who pays a monthly fee for basic email and refuses to give it up.
- Macha 5y ago
  Adtech is the most active market, that's pretty merged with Yahoo's businesses these days. A lot of stuff that wasn't actively branded AOL was run by AOL too, like huffpost, techcrunch, engadget, etc. though Verizon has sold a decent amount of that off prior to now. Also mail/aol.com still has users among an older cohort.
llacb47 5y ago
Apollo will bleed them dry.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
As many nerds as there are who grew up on AOL, I'm surprised they haven't yet gotten together GameStop-style and bought AOL for themselves, to put into a nice retirement home. :)
- Macha 5y ago
  If you mean AOL the closed network, think there's 10 years between the centers of those cohorts. If you mean AIM, it was US-only for too much of its existence. Gamestop was pretty widespread in Europe, North America and Australia at least.
robomartin 5y ago
Every time I hear news about Yahoo I think about Rocketmail [0]. I've had email addresses on Rocketmail for a very long time. I always worry they will shutter this historically significant domain & email service. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMail
ogre_codes 5y ago
This reminds me of the guy who traded a paper clip for a house... only in reverse. Every time these companies get traded, more gets added to the bundle and they sell for less money. Soon it’ll be Yahoo & AOL sold for an NFT of an illustration of a pile of used AOL CDs.
sjg007 5y ago
Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? What is the thesis? Just how is Myspace doing these days? What do we think the opportunity is? One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.
- sellyme 5y ago
  > Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    As fun as your comment is, it literally doesn’t add anything to the conversation. The question is why buy at all.. your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is?
    - sellyme 5y ago
      > your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is? Yes. Just about everyone on the planet is aware that Yahoo is a cursed company that you should stay extremely far away from, but if you look exclusively at the two divisions it does well in (three if you include Japan, which you shouldn't as it's basically a separate company) then they're actually totally competent and profitable systems, which would justify this price tag on their own quite handily. Given the recent Yahoo! Answers news, it seems like Apollo is thinking along the same lines, and are only interested in the good bits of this acquisition.
Dylovell 5y ago
welp, there goes $5B in US pay tax money.... and still no national fiber network.
musicale 5y ago
How much debt does the new AOL/Yahoo owe to its buyout overlords? Hopefully they aren't planning to just drain hefty interest payments out of AOL/Yahoo until it goes bankrupt. It seems like Rackspace and Cox are doing OK though, so that is a good sign?
disordinary 5y ago
AOL was a big brand name as a dial up provider right? Why didn't they just move into dsl, cable, fibre, mobile broadband, etc? It seems like they abandoned that business completely and moved into media.

308 points by mishftw 5y ago

I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars. Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.

dgfitz 5y ago
That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS space I think they would do even better.
- exogeny 5y ago
  They did. Yahoo!’s DFS product is a dismal failure.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to use them ...
  - 0xy 5y ago
    Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.
    - menzoic 5y ago
      I thought trending feed was based on metrics
      - csunbird 5y ago
        Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented manually from entering the trending feed as well.
        ecommerceguy 5y ago
        Hence the finger on the scales. It would be naive to think Twitter doesn't have shills that troll here to downvote anti-twitter posts such as the one above. edit: lol case in point. I once tried twitter advertising and it was the worst ad spend ever.
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have evidence of abuse, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you have no specific evidence, then posts like this are not allowed. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
        HappySweeney 5y ago
        "Cocaine" trends every Saturday early morning, leading me to believe nobody has their thumbs on that particular scale.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition. The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money". Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
    - mssundaram 5y ago
      Certainly not all of them. Edit - do you not consider Warren Buffet a conservative investor?
      - nappy-doo 5y ago
        Or your definition of conservative is different from OP's.
      - ketamine__ 5y ago
        Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs, market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article written by Vitalik Buterin.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
- slg 5y ago
  >Yahoo sports apps I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
  - spullara 5y ago
    I looked this up. The top 2 are DraftKings and FanDuel. They have 90% marketshare. Yahoo is tied for 3rd.
    - StLCylone 5y ago
      Source? Just want to read about it myself.
      - spullara 5y ago
        https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/North-America-Fantasy-Sports-Market-Growth-Trends-COVID-19-Impact-and-Forecasts-Report-2021-2026-Featuring-DraftKings-Fan-Duel-Yahoo-Fantasy-Sports-CBS-Sports-ESPN---ResearchAndMarkets.com https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005804/en/Nor...
    - slg 5y ago
      I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
      - spullara 5y ago
        You're thinking share of users I think rather than share of revenue. But happy to be proven wrong with some other numbers.
the_local_host 5y ago
Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance. It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.
- schnevets 5y ago
  I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    Conflict of interest in what sense?
  - kreeben 5y ago
    Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
- amoorthy 5y ago
  Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
  - ConceptJunkie 5y ago
    Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily, and just kills them, even if they are popular.
NationalPark 5y ago
Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so I don't think it's particularly important (to them). Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation? A lot of it is about presentation. Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room. A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products. But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.
basch 5y ago
I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news. Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street. And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes! I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.
- oblio 5y ago
  > I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
  - basch 5y ago
    AIM was killed as well.
- jijji 5y ago
  Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.
berkes 5y ago
That market is quite busy, though. I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
zaidf 5y ago
I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
mmaunder 5y ago
Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their paid products - that could have been an amazing business for that division. But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board. Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.
u678u 5y ago
There that horrible feeling when sometimes you search for a stock on Yahoo finance and it sends you out into the regular Yahoo search. WTF.
nate-t 5y ago
Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  It's intermittently posted around the web from time-to-time. There's an anonymous answer from a Yahoo employee on Quora here from 2015 that says $150M: https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Yahoo-Finance-make It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.

spamalot159 5y ago

Why would Verizon want to keep a minority stake in Yahoo? Seems useless to me.

rvnx 5y ago
Yahoo has large and growing customers (example: DuckDuckGo)
- mrweasel 5y ago
  What is DuckDuckGo buying from Yahoo? I was under the impression that both search and ads has supplied by Microsoft.
  - fumar 5y ago
    Who does Microsoft partner with for ad monetization? Verizon Media
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      But still how does that make DDG a Yahoo customer?
      - utopcell 5y ago
        DDG was a collection of perl scripts around Yahoo BOSS (Build You Own Search Service), which is now backed by Bing. Nowadays, DDG has vastly outgrown its original serving by adding their most crucial ingredient: Privacy FUD.
        mrweasel 5y ago
        That still doesn't really answer the question of how DDG is a Yahoo customer. BOSS is dead, and replaced by an ad program, which DDG doesn't use.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left; rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her vision. Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm. As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.

52-6F-62 5y ago
Similar things have happened elsewhere in the media world. I've seen some of them first-hand within the org. It was hard to watch a 100-year old magazine of note continuously stretched to its possible thinnest by the parent company because the returns were not what they blindly promised and seemingly wanted to reduce the price of the properties to make a sale cheaper. Thankfully in that case the company who purchased the properties is actively working to bring them back to their former selves.
skinnymuch 5y ago
I went to HuffPo just now. It appears to be same sort of stuff from years ago. HuffPo never had the rep of a shining beacon of journalism or even integrity. Didn it ever make a profit?
- oaththrowaway 5y ago
  No, it was bleeding money for a long time. They had to essentially pay Buzzfeed to take it off their hands.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Very similar to the Tumblr situation.
5y ago

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is sold.

nerdkid93 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024376

acheron 5y ago

"My name is AOL Time Warner, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair." Nothing beside remains.

nolok 5y ago
Hey come on that's unfair, the jokes on that one will forever remain in the history books
ethbr0 5y ago
There's two dead companies in that title, and the only live one owns content. Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.
- oblio 5y ago
  Didn't you, historically, want to be the person selling shovels?
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Depends on how close you were to the 1800s -- widespread steam power & hydraulic mining. Mining shovels became worthless. People who owned exploitable resources continued to make money. (Also, denim)
    - deeblering4 5y ago
      It's a figure of speech. "Shovels" being the tools, e.g. shovels, hydraulic equipment, etc.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Point being that "shovels" change. Everyone always wants water or gold.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    Is that Cisco or Sun in this analogy?

perardi 5y ago

From the article: …“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.” They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion. I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair. Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to keep ahold of the sports bits of Yahoo, which are seemingly popular. (Perhaps that’s why they even managed to get $5 billion for…what does AOL do?)

itsbits 5y ago
AOL has adtech advertisers setup with some large customer base probably 3rd or 4th to Google/Facebook. It also owns publishers like HuffPost, TechCrunch etc.
- perardi 5y ago
  Well when your large customer base leads you to a $5 billion writedown and a public confession that Google and Facebook are eating your lunch… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon-takes-massive-billion-write-down-its-media-business/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon... …color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
  - itsbits 5y ago
    They had good customer base initially. AOL has done so many acquisitions for like Adaptv(video advertising platform), Millenial Media(mobile advertising) etc which were pretty successful. Later ofcourse Yahoo. Failure started coz they platform integration plan didn't work as expected. Lot of talent from the acquisitions left. They still use lot of old tech setup for advertising, web platforms. In summary, they failed in making a single platform from acquisitions they had.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Writing off $5B means a ton of money for Verizon. Right there we can see they already didn’t actually lose half of their investment spend. Most people’s lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had to go with a different ads biz model to not directly compete with the big two. It doesn’t stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I’m hedging 6th in case there’s some one else between Microsoft and Amazon.

fumar 5y ago

I can’t find information on how Apollo Group runs it’s PE portfolio. I assume they will eliminate costs and merge businesses where it makes sense. The press release mentions brick and mortar opportunities but Apollo doesn’t own major brands outside of Sprouts and GNC. It sounds like another miss for Yahoo again.

elliekelly 5y ago
I believe Apollo has a big stake in several casinos. Yahoo’s sports/fantasy data is probably their most valuable & viable site. The regulatory environment surrounding online gambling, sports gambling, and daily fantasy gambling in particular has been changing rapidly and, despite being well situated from a technology standpoint, Yahoo hasn’t made much of an effort to capitalize on it. I’m guessing Apollo plans to find a way for the Yahoo sports data to work with their casinos to get on the legalized gambling gravy train.

yalogin 5y ago

This was never in doubt. Everyone knew this was going to happen. Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it? I have a feeling this is some kind of tax avoidance scheme. Knowing nothing about taxes and accounting I will let knowledgeable people correct me.

debacle 5y ago
With AOL and Yahoo and all the pieces, there was definitely a value play here. Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute that.
mfer 5y ago
Yahoo is still in wide use by people and AOL owns a number of properties and has a decent ad business. It may be that these companies were trying to extract value from them. This happens a decent amount these days. It's less about salvaging a brand.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  I still use Yahoo Finance. Not extensively, but I haven't found a site I like better for getting random stock quotes & sifting through lightweight financial information.
  - blaser-waffle 5y ago
    Yeah same. They have an API that is fairly consistent for stock stuff. If you're gonna do deep diligence there are better tools but for sniffing around, yeah they're good.
- treesknees 5y ago
  In the past few years I've come across several businesses (landscaping, home repairs, etc.) that have been communicating with me using Yahoo email addresses. Many people forget that Yahoo mail was the "Gmail" of its time, and many of those users are still around, especially non-tech oriented users and businesses who have no incentive to switch to anything else.

bdcravens 5y ago

"This next evolution of Yahoo will be the most thrilling yet" I'm very skeptical about that claim.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ strikes again:)
soco 5y ago
"thrilling" as in "causing great emotional or mental stimulation" could mean actually anything, like pondering where you could quickly move your decades of stored emails...
lfowles 5y ago
Turn it back into a curated online directory :)
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  This would actually get me back to using Yahoo. I hope someone that can do it is reading this.
pfortuny 5y ago
You should take into account the meaning of “thriller”.
DogOnTheWeb 5y ago
Especially since it's coming from the guy who just sold Yahoo, and he's not going with it.
rchaud 5y ago
Considering that that's the only part of the memo they quoted, I imagine the rest of it was even more vague.

ncmncm 5y ago

In other news: somebody thought they were worth a positive number.

oaththrowaway 5y ago

Yahoo employee here... AMA

jason2323 5y ago
How do you feel about this whole thing?
- oaththrowaway 5y ago
  I'm not going to stick around
Avalaxy 5y ago
What does Yahoo do nowadays?
- oaththrowaway 5y ago
  Lots of stuff.. Finance is huge, Mail, Sports, Techcrunch, Engadget... Plus the Edgecast CDN and video platform service (VDMS). Was honestly hoping Verizon would keep those so I wasn't lumped into the Apollo sale.
  - basch 5y ago
    That was the most surprising part of this for me. Edgecast/VDMS would make more sense elsewhere than Apollo, like at .. Verizon, or Google.
ForHackernews 5y ago
Is Yahoo hiring? How's the pay? I think it'd be kind of fun to work for a zombie Web 1.0 giant in a weird sociological way. My first email address was @yahoo.com -- thank you for losing/forcibly deleting all my embarrassing teenage missives.
- oaththrowaway 5y ago
  They are hiring (though I suspect this will make recruiting harder), pay is good. Not FAANG good, but Bay area good.

eric__cartman 5y ago

I've been waiting for Yahoo to finally die for a decade now.

Tenoke 5y ago
I haven't heard of anyone using yahoo for anything except to check ticker prices in years.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  My "junk" e-mail address is a yahoo address. I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    Ah, that's actually a significant loss. It's quite useful to be able to search for when you signed up for X or Y years ago. Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now that way.
    - Workaccount2 5y ago
      Yeah recently I had to replace the HID bulbs in my motorcycle. The Amazon ones were junk so I wanted the same ones I originally bought 11 years ago. Sure enough there was the email from 2010 and the company still had the same bulbs.
  - infinityplus1 5y ago
    Just import all emails from Yahoo to Gmail/Outlook. They provide importers.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  A lot of people use it for fantasy sports because... I'm not sure why but they do. Also its impossible to set up email forwarding with them so I have a very old email address I keep active.

soco 5y ago

They definitely squeezed a better deal than with the sale of Tumblr last year (which went for 3 mere millions)

throwaway_kufu 5y ago
At that price I’m surprised some crypto millionaire/billionaire or hell at this point an NFT artist didn’t just buy it as a joke, tokenize it and flip it for profit. It may sound like a joke or sarcasm but it’s not, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we see this AOL/Yahoo turn into some type of crypto play that can be marketed on the back of the old brands.
- daveevad 5y ago
  Maybe Apollo plans on meme-stonking YHOO?
  - throwaway_kufu 5y ago
    I do get the feeling of an underlying crypto play marketed on the old brands AOL/Yahoo. I didn’t even think about something as simple meme stonk. It may sound like sarcasm and a joke, but look at the meme stonks or Doge ($11B+ market cap)...sure the kids on tik tok might not know what yahoo or aol are/were but that actually makes them fresh to the new generation, mixed in with a little nostalgia from those slightly older that would love to jump on the next rocket going to the moon...it’s seriously just 1 Elon tweet from a doubling in value.
    - soco 5y ago
      I don't know what "meme stonking" means, can you please direct me a bit as I don't get anything meaningful from Google?
      - robjan 5y ago
        It's basically doing what happened to AMC and GameStop a couple of months ago

throwaway088 5y ago

Before people go all ballistic, please remember that yahoo and AOL make $700 million from Mail and a billion dollars from search. AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts(for older people though). So the sale price is approximately two years of revenue. Apollo is getting it cheap!

perardi 5y ago
“AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts” Do they really? I am not being sarcastic. I cannot find a recent reference to this (everything seems to be from 2015), but given my experience getting my aunt away from AOL email: it seems horribly plausible.
- runako 5y ago
  > https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new "If you're interested in purchasing a plan that includes dialup service, please call 1-800-827-6364 (Mon-Fri: 8am-12am ET; Sat: 8am-10pm ET)" I would not be surprised to learn that they still have millions of dial-up customers & millions on the new non-dialup plans.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Is dial-up even usable nowadays considering how heavy webpages have become?
- throwaway088 5y ago
  You have to read financial reports of aol if you can get hold of it. AOL doesn't want this info to be too widely known. Then all the old people will realize they are paying $25 per month for something that they can get for free!
- perardi 5y ago
  Ah, and here, a source! https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-still-pay-for-service-but-not-for-dial-up-internet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s... As to dialup itself… “The number of dial-up users is now “in the low thousands,” according to a person familiar with the matter.” …but, yeah, it seems 1.5 million discerning customers are basically paying for AOL mail. “There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private.” Which: nice business if you can get it.

kolbe 5y ago

Is this the final blow for Yahoo!'s finance API?

airstrike 5y ago
Why would it be final? It seems to be quite successful, and any new owner would want to keep it that way
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Acquisitions often result in downsizing, aka "rightsizing" due to newfound efficiencies and synergies.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Right, and they presumably do that to create value rather than destroy. How is that going to hurt Yahoo Finance again?
    - kolbe 5y ago
      There is zero upside to the free public API as far as I can tell. Granted it's low cost to keep it up, but it's not generating any revenue.
      - airstrike 5y ago
        It is generating revenue if it attracts customers to the paid tier.

kumarvvr 5y ago

I still think Yahoo is not worth 5 billion. Sure, it makes some revenue from mail and ads, yahoo mail is essentially the AOL of our generation. Ppl hanging onto it and the new kids dont even know about yahoo.

utopcell 5y ago
They made $1.9BN just this quarter.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Do you have their annual statements? I could not find any beyond the 2017 sec filing. Yahoo has been only marginally profitable for many years now. I don't see any future cashflows, incomes, dividends or even any plan for foray into new business areas. For all intents and purposes, it's a dead company.
  - utopcell 5y ago
    Yahoo is the 8th most visited property in the world [1] and still brings in billions in revenue. Pretty good for a "dead" entity. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-websites-in-the-world/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-website...
    - kumarvvr 5y ago
      As per your link, Yahoo has about 4 Billion monthly visitors. Average Click-Through-Rate for web ads is about 0.5%. That translates to about 20 million ad clicks per month. Average Cost-Per-Click is about 0.5 USD, meaning Yahoo earns about 10 Million dollars from ad clicks. Lets triple it, considering exclusive deals, ad deals, etc. So thats 30 M USD per month, or about 360 M USD per year. Still is it worth about 5 B USD? Also note that this is current rates. Internet is a finicky business where if you drop off the radar of the most active users, you will lose revenue very quick. So the risk adjustment factors for companies like Yahoo will likely be very high.

moron4hire 5y ago

I'll buy Yahoo. I got <checks wallet> $48.67. But when I buy it, I want to be CEO. Don't worry, you only need to pay me half of what you paid the previous CEO. I promise I will only devalue the company by half as much as any other selection for CEO you already have. Think of it! That's 4x the value!

nolok 5y ago

> Verizon [...] combined [Yahoo] with AOL under the umbrella Oath. Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.

elliekelly 5y ago

I wonder what Apollo's due diligence team found on Yahoo Answers that necessitated shutting it down in order to announce the deal.

evanelias 5y ago
I doubt it was anything specific. The simple combination of "user-generated content platform" and "hadn't received any staffing support for many years" means it's a huge potential liability for abuse claims, copyright infringement, etc.

benpink 5y ago

Ersidjdjdejsj

oaththrowaway 5y ago

Yahoo employee. AMA

the_snooze 5y ago
How is babby formed?
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Who will be hosting verizon.net email accounts, held by Frontier customers?
- oaththrowaway 5y ago
  AFAIK, those are still managed by Verizon
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    They are managed by AOL now. Access is thru mail.aol.com. Will they return to Verizon?
    - oaththrowaway 5y ago
      That's interesting. As far as I understood AOL mail was handled by Yahoo at this point.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I haven't seen any indication that Yahoo handles AOL mail but I don't see internal stuff. The setup page for ext access to verizon.net/AOL accounts has a verizon domain for SMTP & POP and an AOL domain for IMAP. eg: pop.verizon.net smtp.verizon.net imap.aol.com ref: https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-applications-to-send-and-receive-my-verizon-net-mail https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-ap... Hopefully this indicates that control over all verizon.net email accounts will fully revert to Verizon. Well, more like a blind wish. AOL mail management has been a little onerous - like mandating quarterly login to the webmail portal, else get locked out of POP access.

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m4rtink 5y ago

Does this include Yahoo Japan or is that already a separate entity? Yahoo is BIG in Japan, with Yahoo Auctions being what Ebay is in other countries.

syntheticnature 5y ago
Yahoo Japan has long been a separate entity.
zkid18 5y ago
Yahoo Japan is a Softbank-owned co

ksec 5y ago

A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article. If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me. Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )

dweekly 5y ago
The reason why they are heavily marketing their mmWave 5G is because they are charging an additional $10/mo/line for access and implying (falsely) that most folks with a modern phone will experience a much faster and lower latency connection at most times. In truth, consumers will only be able to connect to the mmWave network on a handful of outdoor street corners in a few metros - the frequency band (60GHz) does not effectively penetrate walls so you're not going to get it indoors. "Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from. So - mostly it's fraud.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adrr 5y ago
  They have deployed a bunch of mm towers in the metros. LA went from a few blocks to having widespread coverage since last summer. Still not worth the extra $10 a month and the reduction on battery life. I have my 5G disabled. 5G ultra wide is only useful for home internet as a replacement for cable based internet.
- dboreham 5y ago
  I got the impression the primary use case for 60GHz was large sports stadia.

airstrike 5y ago

My first reaction is that this is really good for everyone. For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious. For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimately have a better home than being the ugly duckling in Verizon's portfolio. For Apollo, the benefits are obvious. There's probably lots of operational improvements to execute on, again due to the fact that Verizon was likely not really focused on these businesses. Presumably the fund will reap huge returns if they can deliver on these improvements and exit successfully and timely. ––– EDIT: There is one more nuanced question I forgot to address: is this "really good" for the employees to? On an individual scale, probably not. I'm sure many people will be let go once Apollo is at the helm. But from a broader view, it is arguably "good" for everyone collective in the long run. Verizon really can't do much with the asset, so the alternative to selling is letting it wither away in the hopes of some miracle, with the more likely outcome being that Yahoo and AOL would become even worse shadows of their former selves with each passing day. Eventually people would be let go anyway and those businesses could be shut down unless some miracle strategic buyer (i.e. not a private equity owner) came along and bought them. But most strategic buyers are not comfortable buying bad operations and turning them around. They find it too risky, so that's usually a job left to financial sponsors like Apollo who are built for that. In fact, these days most PEs are not even interested in turning operations around because they also find it too risky—and sponsors learned they can make more than enough money by just being great at finding sub-scale / non-core assets, putting them together in a "platform" and selling them to another sponsor or exiting through an IPO.

skinnymuch 5y ago
Do you really believe Apollo won’t gut up Yahoo and AOL or some other situation where any leftover spirit of the entities isn’t mostly gone? This is better than remaining with Verizon since they don’t want to deal with such small stuff. Here’s hoping things end up better for assets.
- airstrike 5y ago

interestica 5y ago

What part of this article or headline (or this sale in general) suggests "turning focus to its 5G network"?

Macha 5y ago
Verizon's marketing has been "5G, 5G, 5G". Verizon Media was the one part that was not so obviously linked to 5G. Their other two segments, residential and business, could clearly sell 5G to customers. So by ditching their non-ISP division, it's a focus on their ISP business, which is gungho on 5G.

crmd 5y ago

I hope this is the beginning of the end of phone companies expanding into being mass media companies.

lbsnake7 5y ago

Can someone help me understand this from an investment perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup their investment through dividends and such over the last 25 years to justify that market cap? Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?

christophilus 5y ago
Holding those names was an investment failure, as was holding the majority of tech names at that point in history. Trading those names, on the other hand could be lucrative. A friend of mine paid cash for his college education and his car by playing Hand, the maker of palm pilots.
- reiichiroh 5y ago
  Handspring?
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    Presumably. I miss my Visor, tbh.
kumarvvr 5y ago
The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy, putting it lightly. All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all. Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market. Secondly, that five years down the line, there is someone else who is willing to pay for the shares at a premium of what they have originally purchased for. Now what about those who are buying 5 years down the line? They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money. And so on and so forth. So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits. Can everyone get their worth from the shares? Not at once. Not in a hurry.

ppetty 5y ago

I used to work at Aol, and it doesn’t surprise me that some significant number of people still use dial up. Not because they’re “trapped” but because that’s the only choice in some parts of the country. According to Pew, 3% of us are on dialup & more than twice that use no ISP (maybe that 7% just uses their mobile access?). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americans-use-dial-up-at-home/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americ... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americ... … I’m not sure, but it seems plausible that if 3% had to use dialup 100% of those are on Aol (who else offers dialup?). So there’s probably a lot of money to be milked from that cash cow; along with their other ad & publishing businesses.

sida 5y ago
Your 3% number is from 2013 though
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I looked up the Census numbers last year, and for my county it's something like 17% of people have no internet access -at all-. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on a cell phone. And this isn't exactly the boonies. It's a county with over a million people in it. Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
pugworthy 5y ago
I think it's incorrect to just associate AOL with dialup. AOL still exists as a web "portal" and more importantly as an email service. My parents (90's) still use AOL email, and have done so for over 25 years now. They used to use dialup, but now are on high speed internet (cable), using just the web interface for the email. For their sake at least, I hope it doesn't go away any time soon. It works for them very well.

jugg1es 5y ago

As someone who came of age during the 90s, I am amazed at how little this story matters in terms of real-world impact now.

dehrmann 5y ago
This was already becoming true by 2005. Dialup was in decline, and Google was beating Yahoo.
floxy 5y ago
I had to look up whatever became of CompuServe and Prodigy. Interestingly enough, it looks like Prodigy was acquired by Yahoo in 2001 and CompuServe was acquired by AOL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

271828182846 5y ago

Repacked suprime mortgages all over again ...

oblio 5y ago
Have you looked at AOL and Yahoo financials before saying that? I think both are profitable.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

I have my main mail domain linked to a yahoo mail address since 1997. If it goes down .. I'm seriously f**d.

tmaly 5y ago

I have had yahoo email addresses since the late 90s. What is going to happen now?

utopcell 5y ago
You will continue to have Yahoo email addresses for the foreseeable future.

js2 5y ago

> For Apollo, it’s an opportunity to further invest in the digital media space — an industry it has already put money behind with deals for Shutterfly, Rackspace and Cox Media. Cox Media was my first employer (it was called Cox Interactive Media at the time), Verizon Media, my current employer. At the time, I was on the team that ran CIM's web farm which hosted the web presence for all of Cox Enterprises' newspapers, TV, and radio stations. It was a couple dozen Sun Ultras with content on NetApp filers. We ran the farm from Atlanta and connected to it over frame relay. We were colo'd in a datacenter in Sunnyvale. We were a few racks. Yahoo had a presence in the same DC. It was a room or two, PC's running FreeBSD and also quite a few NetApps. The biggest spike in traffic we ever saw was when the Starr Report was released. A couple years later, I was working for Loudcloud, now living in Sunnyvale. Visiting another datacenter, I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Fir... Today, I work as part of the mobile tools team for Verizon Media. The product I'm responsible for is hosted in a combination of AWS and Verizon Media datacenters. In some ways, there's been a lot of changes over the years, but in other ways, not so much. What I used to run on Solaris, today I run on Linux, sometimes on a VM or in a container, but sometimes still on a dedicated server. What I used to code in Shell or Perl or C or Java, today I code in Shell or Python or C or Java or Go or JavaScript. What I used to package into RPMs, today I package into docker images. Databases are still databases. SQL is still SQL. Application servers and web servers are still application servers and web servers. The web is still the web. Input still can't be trusted. Buffers still overflow. Applications still crash. Same shit, different day.

gkolli 5y ago
love this perspective! thank you for sharing your experience across the changing (or not-so-changing!) web landscape!
rasz 5y ago
>I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence: sidenote: Despite the appearance those werent random consumer motherboards. Supermicro P6SBM.

georgeecollins 5y ago

Verizon held Yahoo / AOL for about five years, they were bought at different times. ATT bought Time Warner a little less than three years ago. I think it will take longer for them to give up on that, but I bet they will start selling it (in parts) in three to four years. I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but they are doing a great job of tanking it.

grumple 5y ago

This could be a steal IF Apollo can fix the management and leadership issues at both companies. There's a real opportunity with both companies - both have pretty high revenues to only go for 5B. If you can cut down on operations cost OR use the ops cost to create more revenue, you can turn garbage to gold. They have a large number of engineers at both companies - I have to believe that with this number of engineers, you can find ways to make money if you get management under control.

Animats 5y ago

Good. Large companies should not both be in both transmission and content. It's a conflict of interest. Remember the "zero rating" issue for cellular.

bearcobra 5y ago

I wonder how things would have gone had Microsoft been successful in its acquisition of Yahoo. The value of the Altaba assets don't make the offered price seem quite so crazy in retrospect.

irrational 5y ago

Wait, AOL is still around? What do they do these days? Does anyone here work for AOL?

r0m4n0 5y ago
Do not work for AOL but know that their email service is still heavily used. I have a family member who pays a monthly fee for basic email and refuses to give it up.
Macha 5y ago
Adtech is the most active market, that's pretty merged with Yahoo's businesses these days. A lot of stuff that wasn't actively branded AOL was run by AOL too, like huffpost, techcrunch, engadget, etc. though Verizon has sold a decent amount of that off prior to now. Also mail/aol.com still has users among an older cohort.

llacb47 5y ago

Apollo will bleed them dry.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

As many nerds as there are who grew up on AOL, I'm surprised they haven't yet gotten together GameStop-style and bought AOL for themselves, to put into a nice retirement home. :)

Macha 5y ago
If you mean AOL the closed network, think there's 10 years between the centers of those cohorts. If you mean AIM, it was US-only for too much of its existence. Gamestop was pretty widespread in Europe, North America and Australia at least.

robomartin 5y ago

Every time I hear news about Yahoo I think about Rocketmail [0]. I've had email addresses on Rocketmail for a very long time. I always worry they will shutter this historically significant domain & email service. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMail

ogre_codes 5y ago

This reminds me of the guy who traded a paper clip for a house... only in reverse. Every time these companies get traded, more gets added to the bundle and they sell for less money. Soon it’ll be Yahoo & AOL sold for an NFT of an illustration of a pile of used AOL CDs.

sjg007 5y ago

Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? What is the thesis? Just how is Myspace doing these days? What do we think the opportunity is? One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.

sellyme 5y ago
> Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
- sjg007 5y ago
  As fun as your comment is, it literally doesn’t add anything to the conversation. The question is why buy at all.. your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is?
  - sellyme 5y ago
    > your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is? Yes. Just about everyone on the planet is aware that Yahoo is a cursed company that you should stay extremely far away from, but if you look exclusively at the two divisions it does well in (three if you include Japan, which you shouldn't as it's basically a separate company) then they're actually totally competent and profitable systems, which would justify this price tag on their own quite handily. Given the recent Yahoo! Answers news, it seems like Apollo is thinking along the same lines, and are only interested in the good bits of this acquisition.

Dylovell 5y ago

welp, there goes $5B in US pay tax money.... and still no national fiber network.

musicale 5y ago

How much debt does the new AOL/Yahoo owe to its buyout overlords? Hopefully they aren't planning to just drain hefty interest payments out of AOL/Yahoo until it goes bankrupt. It seems like Rackspace and Cox are doing OK though, so that is a good sign?

disordinary 5y ago

AOL was a big brand name as a dial up provider right? Why didn't they just move into dsl, cable, fibre, mobile broadband, etc? It seems like they abandoned that business completely and moved into media.