Yahoo employee here... AMA
[deleted]
Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
101–110 of 366 posts
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#102This was never in doubt. Everyone knew this was going to happen. Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it? I have a feeling this is some kind of tax avoidance scheme. Knowing nothing about taxes and accounting I will let knowledgeable people correct me.
> Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it?
Apparently so. Or at least that's my distinct impression from working at a Yahoo subsidiary at the time of acquisition by Verizon. It appeared that Tim Armstrong had legitimately convinced the top Verizon execs that a combination of AOL + Yahoo would somehow create an advertising titan capable of competing with Google and Facebook.
It's quite surprising that they went through with this, given that it's a pretty ludicrous notion: a single major brand/company comeback is challenging enough in tech, but the merger of two of them at once? There's no historical precedent for that succeeding, as far as I can think. Especially with a new name as objectively terrible as "Oath".
Internally, morale was never good. It didn't help that Tim would send out weekly all-company emails that were, at best, a nonsensical word salad of business strategy jargon straight from HBO's Silicon Valley.
Literally all of the Verizon execs who were involved with this calamity are long gone now, and Verizon's previous CEO retired in 2018. My impression is the new CEO basically just wants to focus on 5G and get rid of this mess of bad acquisitions.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#103From the article: …“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.” They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion. I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair. Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to ke…
They didn’t lose that much money. The companies were profitable. They sold assets. If they lost money. It would be maybe $1B at most. I doubt that happened though. The tax write offs gave back a lot of money too.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#104I wonder what Apollo's due diligence team found on Yahoo Answers that necessitated shutting it down in order to announce the deal.
I doubt it was anything specific. The simple combination of "user-generated content platform" and "hadn't received any staffing support for many years" means it's a huge potential liability for abuse claims, copyright infringement, etc.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#105Yahoo employee. AMA
Under their Oath umbrella, Verizon operates domains (such as wow.com, love.com, etc.) that customers still use for email, do you think they’ll sell these assets off?
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
AOL has adtech advertisers setup with some large customer base probably 3rd or 4th to Google/Facebook. It also owns publishers like HuffPost, TechCrunch etc.
Well when your large customer base leads you to a $5 billion writedown and a public confession that Google and Facebook are eating your lunch… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon... …color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
Writing off $5B means a ton of money for Verizon. Right there we can see they already didn’t actually lose half of their investment spend.
Most people’s lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had to go with a different ads biz model to not directly compete with the big two.
It doesn’t stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I’m hedging 6th in case there’s some one else between Microsoft and Amazon.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#107From the article: …“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.” They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion. I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair. Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to ke…
AOL has adtech advertisers setup with some large customer base probably 3rd or 4th to Google/Facebook. It also owns publishers like HuffPost, TechCrunch etc.
I think Verizon Media is 5th after the big two, Amazon, Microsoft. Unless LinkedIn is separate from Microsoft.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#108What part of this article or headline (or this sale in general) suggests "turning focus to its 5G network"?
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#109I hope this is the beginning of the end of phone companies expanding into being mass media companies.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#110My first reaction is that this is really good for everyone. For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious. For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimat…
Do you really believe Apollo won’t gut up Yahoo and AOL or some other situation where any leftover spirit of the entities isn’t mostly gone? This is better than remaining with Verizon since they don’t want to deal with such small stuff. Here’s hoping things end up better for assets.
Define "gut up". Why would Apollo want to destroy the asset they just bought?