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Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

bloomberg.com

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Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#11

Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan). Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall…

Yahoo! earns less than Google per search [1], has few other properties, is trashing its already-moribund brand and keeps growing its legal liabilities. Consider, too, the political/headline risk Verizon would inherit.

Yahoo! (like Twitter, in my opinion) may only find a buyer in that sort of financial purchaser who doesn't mind looking bad resurrecting corpses. Unfortunately, those bidders are notorious low ballers.

[1] http://marketingland.com/yahoo-microsoft-rps-guarantee-42680

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#12
post #9

Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan). Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall…

Is Search traffic really correlated with revenue? I was under the impression Google was mostly ads revenue.

Uhh yes and where do you think they show the ads?

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#13
post #3

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.

Import to Wordpress. They've been chronically unable to monetise Tumblr. Assume they could Geocities you at any moment.

You can't forcibly migrate other people to wordpress, and its their blogs which have the value.

Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#14

Yahoo has some good stuff, but their brand-name is just so, so toxic now. I hope that if the deal goes through (and I'm sure it will), Verizon will still keep the better Yahoo services running.

I have to imagine if they do buy it, they'll strip it for parts. They already have AOL, which has a dated name, but not one now synonymous with horrible security. And with the redundant properties between AOL and Yahoo, I can't fathom them not wanting to consolidate those, probably into a new brand entirely.

Between AOL and Yahoo (and their own Verizon email addresses where they're an ISP), they'd have a huge portion of the world's email accounts, and I could see a push to pull an Outlook.com: Move everyone to a new service, but keep all the old legacy email addresses from older services.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#16

Can anyone explain to me why Yahoo is not worth over $4B?

Sure thing!

Imagine if I had two friends, Google and Yahoo. Both are asking me if they can borrow a dollar.

Over the last few years when Google borrows a dollar it gives back an extra 3.5 cents the next year as a thank you. On the opposite side, when Yahoo has borrowed a dollar they've lost 13 cents within the next year.

Left to their own devices, Yahoo will implode and be out of money in under 7 years, likely much sooner. The $4 billion price tag was a way of salvaging what may still be valuable properties within Yahoo, but the company on paper is rapidly losing money at any valuation.

It's like asking someone to buy a car that's broken when it's unclear if they can fix it.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#17
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Search traffic really correlated with revenue? I was under the impression Google was mostly ads revenue.

Uhh yes and where do you think they show the ads?

Oh search sure, but I thought they would get more views on things like DoubleClick ads embedded in other pages.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Import to Wordpress. They've been chronically unable to monetise Tumblr. Assume they could Geocities you at any moment.

You can't forcibly migrate other people to wordpress, and its their blogs which have the value. Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.

Perhaps there's scope for a tumblr mirror, which could eventually take over from real-tumblr (and allow the blog owners to continue blogging) in the event that real-tumblr goes all geocities.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#20

Can anyone explain to me why Yahoo is not worth over $4B?

Reposting because this series of articles is by far the best explanation of the Yahoo situation over the past year or two: http://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-02/yaho...
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