4 ms·
Feels like a lateral move motivated by money and perhaps boredom. Interesting too to contrast Tinder with Bumble which is founder led and growing. Mature stagna
by throwaway9980 5y ago
Feels like a lateral move motivated by money and perhaps boredom. Interesting too to contrast Tinder with Bumble which is founder led and growing. Mature stagnant shuffling companies CEO, you can see clearly that the energy is gone.
- crispyambulance 5y ago> Mature stagnant shuffling It's worse than stagnant. I don't get why Verizon paid 9B for Yahoo and now is just selling it for 5B. Perhaps there's some bizarre finance logic behind it? But wouldn't it have been better for Verizon and now Apollo Global to invest in fresh stuff instead of the VERY CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED DOWNWARD SPIRAL of the Yahoo brand? Did Verizon actually intend to revive the brand? It doesn't seem they did. Nor does Apollo Global which, it appears, are just a bunch of bankers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sfblah 5y agoI think GP was referring to Tinder as the place where mature stagnant shuffling is occurring.
- sumtechguy 5y agoAll they wanted was the advert network. They valued the rest at 0, to be sold off, or shut down. The same with AOL.
- crispyambulance 5y agoOK, I see now that Yahoo is still making money, though it's been declining. They're now at just under 2 Billion in annual revenue. That's surprising! They look to be little more than a news aggregator at this point, so it's just eyeballs from the inertia of users' force of habit to use Yahoo? I suppose this gives a "life span" of, at most, a few years before the lights get turned off at Yahoo.
- sfblah 5y agoYahoo Search is a massive search arbitrage business. Look deeper and you'll see a ton of revenue and profit. It's just a grimy business.
- toast0 5y agoI have no idea what Verizon's plan was, but I assume Apollo's plan is to ride Yahoo into the ground, and they've forecast the present value of the revenue vs costs, and it works out. I left Yahoo in 2011, but back then, profit margins were usually OK but not nearly as good as competitors. Mostly properties were run by small teams but competing ok against much larger dedicated companies. And then there was search; outsourcing it mostly to Bing but keeping a large team and crawling infrastructure to do customizations didn't make sense to me, but it's what happened. I don't know how much of the small team enabled by corporate stuff + central advertising team still works at Yahoo, if it's still there, maybe there's hope.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoKeep in mind that when a company is being sold the buyer is, almost by definition, the most optimistic of all the parties looking at the asset. So Verizon had some big plan where they could make a lot of money out of it. It was... too optimistic.