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Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

nytimes.com

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Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#141

Post by Workaccount2 »

Tenoke wrote: post #36
Workaccount2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "junk" e-mail address is a yahoo address. I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.

Ah, that's actually a significant loss. It's quite useful to be able to search for when you signed up for X or Y years ago. Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now that way.

Yeah recently I had to replace the HID bulbs in my motorcycle. The Amazon ones were junk so I wanted the same ones I originally bought 11 years ago. Sure enough there was the email from 2010 and the company still had the same bulbs.

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#142

Post by spenczar5 »

schnevets wrote: post #112
the_local_host wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance. It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.

I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.

Conflict of interest in what sense?

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#143

Post by menzoic »

0xy wrote: post #135
johannes1234321 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to use them ...

Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.

I thought trending feed was based on metrics

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#144

Post by dcolkitt »

enos_feedler wrote: post #84
StratusBen wrote: post #78

I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars. Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate…

I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.

My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition.

The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money".

Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#145

Post by Macha »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #113
oaththrowaway wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. As far as I understood AOL mail was handled by Yahoo at this point.

I haven't seen any indication that Yahoo handles AOL mail but I don't see internal stuff. The setup page for ext access to verizon.net/AOL accounts has a verizon domain for SMTP & POP and an AOL domain for IMAP. eg: pop.verizon.net smtp.verizon.net imap.aol.com ref: https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-ap... Hopefully this indicates that control over all verizon.net email accounts will fully reve…

My understanding is similar to oaththrowaway, these are all internally handled by the same backend systems.

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#146

Post by reiichiroh »

christophilus wrote: post #124
lbsnake7 wrote: post #116

Can someone help me understand this from an investment perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup their investment through dividends and such over the last 25 years to justify that market cap? Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company…

Holding those names was an investment failure, as was holding the majority of tech names at that point in history. Trading those names, on the other hand could be lucrative. A friend of mine paid cash for his college education and his car by playing Hand, the maker of palm pilots.

Handspring?

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#147

Post by StratusBen »

dcolkitt wrote: post #144
enos_feedler wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.

My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition. The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Int…

I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#148

Post by csunbird »

menzoic wrote: post #143
0xy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending" feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and others boosted. Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the scale in both directions in multiple places.

I thought trending feed was based on metrics

Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented manually from entering the trending feed as well.

Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

#150

Post by roymurdock »

ksec wrote: post #89

A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article. If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a…

A useful 5G network is much broader than what VZ currently has set up in the mmWave range (high-band, >6GHz, high-speed, low propagation)

Verizon's next 5G investment is to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, in the C-Band (mid-band, 3.7-3.98 GHz, good speed, good propagation)

VZ spent $54B on C-Band spectrum in March, then committed to spend an additional $10B over the next 3 years to deploy towers to use that spectrum, and that's above the $18B they had already planned on mid-band 5G CAPEX

VZ is taking on a lot of debt to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, and this sale will help them chip away at that huge mountain of debt

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