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I remember being shocked when Yahoo spurned MSFT's $44+ billion offer in 2008. Goes to show, when someone offers you 11 figures for a failing company, sell because the offers aren't going to get better.
"The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook." Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"? Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of in…
In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1].
Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end platform for the creation, delivery and monetization of content (with focus on video) in the Internet.
Disclosure: I work at EdgeCast and we operate as a technology company, hate bureaucracy and try very hard to innovate and stay agile.
YHOO used to be valued at $112B at its peak.
I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that:
100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion.
Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.
Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ Times -- and fortunes -- change.
Had to look it up, for curiosity: In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion (or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users. -- Wikipedia These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction.
What is likely to happen to shareholders of YHOO?
They will receive about $5.27[1] per share of YHOO stock they hold (or perhaps an equivalent amount of verizon stock if they do the deal that way) in exchange for the portion of the business being sold. Perhaps a bit less than this if there are transaction fees or taxes that must be paid. They will then continue to hold their Yahoo shares which will represent their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan as well as Yahoo…
Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuation, right?
Forgive my incredulity, I genuinely didn't know how this kind of thing worked.
>Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers - which is tied to their handsets - with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites. I was talking to a friend who is in the Telecom industry in Japan, and apparently this sort of arrangement is not legal there. EU is generally wary of such arrangements as well. So this is a merger whose product syn…
The problem with yahoo was never quality of the traffic. They have the most coveted audiences cornered. Their problem is the lack of good ad units. They have banners... That's unacceptable in 2016.
But I just launched a yahoo/gemini campaign 2 weeks ago, for leadgen on web. They definitely have more than banners.
(Also, I've found banner ads can refer to either the format [728x90 graphic] or the model [pay per view/CPM/CPV]. They offer the gamut just like everyone else, even the small shady players.
To say that yahoo just has banners is very incorrect.
Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import (http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/), but I'm running into errors and getting weird results.
I remember being shocked when Yahoo spurned MSFT's $44+ billion offer in 2008. Goes to show, when someone offers you 11 figures for a failing company, sell because the offers aren't going to get better.
People were also shocked when Zuckerberg turned down $1+ billion offers. Hindsight is 20/20.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will receive about $5.27[1] per share of YHOO stock they hold (or perhaps an equivalent amount of verizon stock if they do the deal that way) in exchange for the portion of the business being sold. Perhaps a bit less than this if there are transaction fees or taxes that must be paid. They will then continue to hold their Yahoo shares which will represent their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan as well as Yahoo…
Wait?! is that really how this works? What if people want to keep owning the online part of the business? Are they hooped? Seems like you could really royally screw shareholders like that (i.e. sell all the good parts and leave shareholders holding the bad parts). Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuatio…
When you sell part of a business, the owners of the business (the stockholders) receive their share of the proceeds. Management (the CEO and other senior leaders) is hired by the stockholders to negotiate these sorts of deals (among other things). The stockholders are always free to fire management for poor performance if they don't like what management is doing.
You are correct to note that Yahoo's actual business represents only a small portion of the value of the company at this point. The majority of the value of the company is Yahoo's holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (a similarly named but completely separate enterprise).
Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that they managed to get $5B for their core business. I think YHOO shareholders are getting a pretty good deal here.