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Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#241

Post by _nedR »

coldtea wrote: post #73
kennywinker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's turns out valuations are imaginary numbers that mean nothing? 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.

> 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. And if you've convinced enough people that this is the case, so you get at least a few million dollars in investment, that would mean your company in…

The sort of thing described happens a lot though, way more than you seem to be implying. IMO a lot of investments of this nature (involving few participants) are just circle-jerks among rich friends.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#242

Post by karma_vaccum123 »

rekshaw wrote: post #227

can someone explain why yahoo is worth a penny?

Trailing-edge users.

Trailing-edge users are those people we might otherwise make fun of, but they don't run adblockers and they don't constantly question the services they use. These people have used Yahoo Mail for a decade and will continue to for the rest of their lives.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#243

Post by andy_ppp »

coldtea wrote: post #69
andy_ppp wrote: post #47

What the hell has Marissa Mayer been paid for? Everything about this smells like Yahoo! is being run by idiot MBAs with some spreadsheets somewhere totally misunderstanding that technology can empower people to do fantastic things including those working within Yahoo! - instead it's been hamstrung by each property not being held accountable to it's competitors effectively. I would have started competitors (startups)…

> I would have started competitors (startups) internally for all of Yahoo!'s key products (buy Y.com and test them under that) and told the current product owners if their products were not better faster than these startups could build them they'd be replaced. If only those in charge of Yahoo and other failing companies knew of such a cunning strategy... /s

You make it sound as if:

a) startups aren't better at building websites than big businesses

b) Yahoo! management came up with something better...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#244

Post by Agustus »

peteretep wrote: post #222
tehwebguy wrote: post #49

Verizon shouldn't be allowed to own any web properties. They inject a unique subscriber identifier into your HTTP requests unless you turn it off. http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-hea...

I use a VPN (Freedome) by default on the basis that people I'm paying for connectivity should only be providing that, and not any other "interesting" features like DNS catching, invisible proxies, or fucking with my HTTP.

Could you detail how you chose Freedome for your VPN?

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#245

Post by 086421357909764 »

shortformblog wrote: post #232
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to parse "not expected to join Verizon" against Mayer's explicit statement that "For me personally, I’m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter": http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/147941613134/verizon-to-a...

She can "plan to stay" all she wants. If she's forced out, then the best-laid plans are for naught.

Unless there's still a Yahoo (with the patents, Alibaba stake, and whatever else is left over), which in that case she could technically stay. I'd imagine most of that is going onto the block too.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#247

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

086421357909764 wrote: post #245
shortformblog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She can "plan to stay" all she wants. If she's forced out, then the best-laid plans are for naught.

Unless there's still a Yahoo (with the patents, Alibaba stake, and whatever else is left over), which in that case she could technically stay. I'd imagine most of that is going onto the block too.

AIUI Verizon is buying the brand, so although there'll be corporate continuity from today's Yahoo! to Lucky Internet Investments Inc. (or whatever the China/Japan/patents vehicle is called), "staying at Yahoo" means "moving to Verizon".

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#248

Post by mason55 »

Grue3 wrote: post #235

That seems incredibly cheap, when stuff like LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter and so on having bigger valuations, despite being just as unprofitable.

One of the keys to having a valuation that's higher than your discounted cash flow is whether or not people think you can grow. Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat are all growth-stage companies so there is less relation between their valuation and the sum of their assets. Yahoo! is much closer to a mature company so their valuation is better determined by a sum of assets minus liabilities.

With LinkedIn you had an obvious path to continue growing as well as a pretty obvious path to profitability whenever they decided to stop growing.

Snapchat actually has pretty big growth prospects and has shown that they can monetize very well, so they can command a much higher multiple of their current earnings.

Twitter's market cap is just over 2x what Yahoo! sold for, so it's not like people think they are THAT much more valuable, and their stock has taken quite a beating over the last year because they're showing that they don't have a path to growth.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#249

Post by peteretep »

Agustus wrote: post #244
peteretep wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a VPN (Freedome) by default on the basis that people I'm paying for connectivity should only be providing that, and not any other "interesting" features like DNS catching, invisible proxies, or fucking with my HTTP.

Could you detail how you chose Freedome for your VPN?

It's run by F-Secure. I've known the F-Secure guys for a long time, and I trust them and I trust the brand. I think they'll use time and resources to fight what they consider to be over-broad surveillance orders, and I think they're competent from a security perspective.
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