Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? What is the thesis? Just how is Myspace doing these days? What do we think the opportunity is?
One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.
Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
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Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#312welp, there goes $5B in US pay tax money.... and still no national fiber network.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
I think the first charting software was written by one talented javascript guy. I think he moved on and the next person did not want to touch the code. Which is the story of many Google services.
That's funny because the Google Finance charting software was famously Flash.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#314How much debt does the new AOL/Yahoo owe to its buyout overlords?
Hopefully they aren't planning to just drain hefty interest payments out of AOL/Yahoo until it goes bankrupt.
It seems like Rackspace and Cox are doing OK though, so that is a good sign?
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy, putting it lightly. All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all. Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confid…
In other words, the greater fool theory.
No, the opposite.
The value of a company in a fair market is a function of the confidence of investors that someone in the future will pay more for the same stock.
For a highly profitable company like Facebook, this isn't a foolish confidence in anyway. Even if you don't like Facebook it would be a very radical position to take to think that their profits next quarter will be remarkably lower than this quarter.
In greater fool theory, you know there is no reason the investment is going to increase in value. You are just hoping someone else is going to buy from you and accept that risk too.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#316AOL was a big brand name as a dial up provider right? Why didn't they just move into dsl, cable, fibre, mobile broadband, etc? It seems like they abandoned that business completely and moved into media.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#317I'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 actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news…
Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#318I'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…
Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#319Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5? What is the thesis? Just how is Myspace doing these days? What do we think the opportunity is? One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.
> Would you buy AOL and Yahoo for $5?
Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
Re: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Yahoo actually turning a profit, if so which service contribute the most? Also, are there any stats explaining why so Yahoo still have so many daily visitors? Is it just result of having a ton of service and then the numbers afe bundled? It seems hard to understand that pages like Yahoo (or msn.com) would attract so many users as the Alexa ranking would suggest.
Comscore ranks Verizon's properties (basically Yahoo/AOL) as the #2 site on the internet as well. https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings
Comscore’s data collection relies on users installing their shady monitoring software - I imagine users who install such software are significantly more likely to have a yahoo email account. Same issue with Alexa ranks.