Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by bduerst » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

iaw wrote: post #21

anton_tarasenko wrote: post #6

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 lost $650 million last quarter, why do you think anyone would take the deal in the first place?

IP. Yahoo!'s patents are valued between $4B and $8B, depending on who you ask.

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

#52

Post by bduerst » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

chinhodado wrote: post #36

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #4

Verizon would be stupid not to walk away from the deal at this point. Setting aside that $4 billion was clearly way too much, Verizon, as the parent company, would be liable for any lawsuits against Yahoo resulting from the last few leaks.

It's funny that $4b is deemed "way too much" for Yahoo when Snapchat is valued at $20b something, and Linkedin was bought for $26b. And Instagram and Whatsapp and all the other unicorns.

Were Instagram and Whatsapp unicorns?

FB put down billion dollar purchases for them, but they weren't the inflated-valuation investor rodeos we see with unicorns.

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

#53

Post by brilliantcode » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

oddevan wrote: 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.

Maybe it will end up like the geocities. All in all, I stay away from tumblr because the pages always crash and slows to a crawl. I'm not sure if Marissa accounted for the fact that Tumblr's users are far far less likely to look at ads than even FB.

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

#54

Post by brilliantcode » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:42 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #44

oddevan wrote: 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.

For me, it's Flickr that I would be annoyed losing. Not so much for my own photo hosting which is easily moved elsewhere. Everything is local on Lightroom anyway and I basically never use the social aspect of Flickr any longer. But Flickr is a great repository of other content, including a great deal of Creative Commons and public domain, that AFAIK isn't available with nearly the quantity or curation elsewhere. Mayb…

interesting...forgot about flickr. to be honest imgur and even reddituploads pretty much killed it for me.

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

#55

Post by heisenbit » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:42 PM UTC

Fixing Yahoo seems impossible. It is bleeding cash and has at its scale no really credible strategic business model as a conglomerate of ideas. Selling it may fall flat now. Would it be possible to split it up? It may be easier to find a strategic direction for parts of it and maybe wind up others?

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

#56

Post by patrick_haply » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

hxegon wrote: post #37

jstanley wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like that would be a TOS violation.

If a service doesn't exist, can you violate its TOS?

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

#57

Post by bmh100 » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information security should be viewed as vital insurance that directly impacts shareholder value.

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

#58

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #22

pjc50 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it an important community? I thought it was a blogging platform? Can't users just migrate to wordpress?

It's a social network, not a blogging platform. You have a consistent identity across the entire site, including everyone else's blogs that you comment on. It's closer to Facebook (with a larger focus on writing original posts) than it is to WordPress. If you were around for LiveJournal, it's more like that.

Tumblr has a huge community and there are a large number of niche topics that have their biggest communities on Tumblr.

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

#59

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

dexwiz wrote: post #17

rlanday wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For Q3 2016 Google earned over 70% of its revenue and 80% of its advertising revenue from "Google websites" [1].

Google websites include search as well as YouTube, Gmail, et cetera. AdSense, AdMob or DoubleClick revenues make up the bulk of the other 20%.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204416... pages 31, 33

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

#60

Post by elliottcarlson » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #32

vntok wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not migrate them to WordPress.com (the platform) then?

Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow? From what I've seen (and I'll admit to not being overly familiar with either), WordPress and Tumblr are very different beasts with every different aims.

This has been one of the things I saw as the biggest hurdle (as a former Tumblr employee) - most people unfamiliar with Tumblr assume it's a blogging platform, while the dashboard with its social aspects is biggest component of Tumblr. Wordpress and Tumblr are very different beasts when it comes to what they offer in whole - though Wordpress would suit those that only use Tumblr as a blogging platform.