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Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

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Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#71

Post by otoburb »

tehwebguy wrote: post #49

Verizon shouldn't be allowed to own any web properties. They inject a unique subscriber identifier into your HTTP requests unless you turn it off. http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-hea...

Adoption of HTTPS helps somewhat to counter this, but note that advertisers and content sites are also complicit. Carriers wouldn't have injected such headers without demand from content partners and other run-of-the-mill sites.

Vilifying carriers only attacks half the problem.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#72

Post by semi-extrinsic »

vram22 wrote: post #43
randywaterhouse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to consider the reasons for the past valuation -- before everyone realized Alibaba was blowing up (I believe it was So, in 2016 dollars we're talking $5bn for their core web business vs. 50bn+ (2016 dollars) for the 2008 MSFT offer.

Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?

http://abstrusegoose.com/389

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#73

Post by coldtea »

kennywinker wrote: post #33
randomname2 wrote: post #16

YHOO used to be valued at $112B at its peak.

It's turns out valuations are imaginary numbers that mean nothing? I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that: 100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion. Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.

>I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that: 100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion.

And if you've convinced enough people that this is the case, so you get at least a few million dollars in investment, that would mean your company indeed has some value.

But selling $1 of beer of $2 to a friend once never got anybody anywhere.

You seem to conflate what happens in micro-micro-scale with what should be shown to be able to happen in the macro-world, for a valuation like $5 billion to start involving people investing lots of real money.

In other words, sure, valuations are based on extrapolation, but it's BS to think they're the same as (or based on) any small-scale extrapolation of an statistically insignificant transation (selling $2 worth of beer).

When the volume/sales/eyeballs/etc get so many that people start actually investing big money according to a large-sh valuation, the company has already passed a lot of basic tests...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#74

Post by dgacmu »

vram22 wrote: post #43
randywaterhouse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to consider the reasons for the past valuation -- before everyone realized Alibaba was blowing up (I believe it was So, in 2016 dollars we're talking $5bn for their core web business vs. 50bn+ (2016 dollars) for the 2008 MSFT offer.

Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?

The way to consistently use 'm' as thousand and 'mm' as million is if you assume a Latin derivation, with 'm' short for mille. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mille#Latin ('mm' thus being 'thousand thousand', since roman numerals don't compose that way -- MM would be two thousand).

That doesn't mean that that's the way it evolved, but it's a way to categorize it mentally so it makes sense. While there's no logic for it conflating with 'million' and 'mega', at least 'mm' is fairly unique, unless you measure your money by its length.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#75

Post by seanhunter »

vram22 wrote: post #43
randywaterhouse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to consider the reasons for the past valuation -- before everyone realized Alibaba was blowing up (I believe it was So, in 2016 dollars we're talking $5bn for their core web business vs. 50bn+ (2016 dollars) for the 2008 MSFT offer.

Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?

I used to work in finance, and there is a bunch of obscure terminology and conventions, adopted from different cultures (eg you can trade a "Lakh" of silver).

See how the currency sign for GBP looks like a capital L? and the currency sign for shillings and pence was "s" and "d"? (now the uk use "p" for pence since decimalisation). So "Lire", "Soldi" and "Denarii" were the denominations of Italian currency in the the late Renaissance, and this obscure terminology was because originally the bankers in London were from Lombardy.

So I always thought MM was the same. For something like "Mille Mille" (ie one thousand thousands). I don't have any reference for this, that was just my own theory, and it's slightly undermined by the fact that the Italians have a word for "Million" ("Milione").

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#76

Post by moeamaya »

kennywinker wrote: post #33
randomname2 wrote: post #16

YHOO used to be valued at $112B at its peak.

It's turns out valuations are imaginary numbers that mean nothing? I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that: 100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion. Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.

Strangely enough, this happened last year. Ballast Point was somehow able to sell six-packs of beer @ $16 when all it's competitors were fighting each other around the $10-12 price point. Keep scaling those margins up then get bought out for $1 billion: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ballast-point-beer-dea...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#77

Post by spriggan3 »

harmegido wrote: post #61
jaggederest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about other people, but there's a number past which I do not care . N > 10^7 in my pocket after tax, I'm out, regardless of circumstances, regardless of ability to earn more. No ragrets.

I suspect it's not about money at a certain point.

It is always about the money. The more money you have the more money you need to manage the money you already have. So it is always about the money. The Zuck was confident his website was worth way more than a billion. that's why he didn't sell.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#78

Post by sangnoir »

sandstrom wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #4

Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ Times -- and fortunes -- change.

Had to look it up, for curiosity: In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion (or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users. -- Wikipedia These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction.

> These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction

These were the heady days before the dot-com bubble burst. In April of '99, Pets.com had just IPO'd (February) and Webvan was a going concern. The 'information highway' replacing traditional radio was believable enough. I don't think at the time anyone knew it was a waste. Hindsight is 20/20.

Offtopic: Only today did I put 2 and 2 together on the inspiration for Silicon Valley's Russ Hanneman "I put radio on the internet" joke...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#79

Post by akandiah »

zzleeper wrote: post #62
dogma1138 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly a unique case, AMD is worth less now than what it paid for ATI back in the day.

Dude ATI was in 2006, but in 2009 they divested Global Foundry in 2009 (which were a HUGE chunk of ATI's assets)

GlobalFoundries was a spin-off from AMD - not ATI!

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#80

Post by davidgerard »

kmfrk wrote: post #38

While Flickr has decent export tools (you just get your photos without tags, descriptions - literally anything else), Tumblr's have always been non-existent aside from an unofficial, macOS-only tool by Marco whose download link ( https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is-ready-... ) no longer works. Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import ( http://import.jek…

Wordpress's Tumblr importer reputedly works pretty well. YMMV and test first, of course.
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