Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo

It's (Past) Time to Close That Yahoo Account

Verizon announced today that it will sell AOL and Yahoo to Global Management for $5 billion. The resulting company will be called Yahoo.

“We are excited to be joining forces with Apollo,” Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan said. “The past two quarters of double-digit growth have demonstrated our ability to transform our media ecosystem. With Apollo’s sector expertise and strategic insight, Yahoo will be well-positioned to capitalize on market opportunities, media, and transaction experience and continue to grow our full-stack digital advertising platform. This transition will help to accelerate our growth for the long-term success of the company.”

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

This transaction marks an ignoble end for AOL, formerly called America Online and once one of the most powerful media brands in the world. But even for Yahoo, which has also bounced between several owners as its influence waned, this isn’t a particularly satisfying outcome. These two companies once dominated the Internet, after all—Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo in 2008 for $44.6 billion—but today they are just vestigial afterthoughts.

Mr. Gowrappan will continue to run the new company, which will also include Verizon’s advertising business. And Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the new company.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 24 comments

  • bart

    Premium Member
    03 May, 2021 - 9:23 am

    <p>Wasn’t MS going to buy Yahoo! for $45B?</p>

    • jchampeau

      Premium Member
      03 May, 2021 - 9:29 am

      <p>You’re correct. According to Reuters, Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo was $44.6 billion in February 2008, which is just shy of $55 billion today, adjusted for inflation. Wow.</p>

    • MikeCerm

      03 May, 2021 - 10:09 am

      <p>To be fair, for Microsoft it might have actually made some kind of sense. Microsoft wanted a search engine and Yahoo still had some kind of presence in the search engine business, even if they were a distant 2nd place to Google. Microsoft launched Bing a year later, and maybe they could have saved a lot of hassle by just acquiring Yahoo and developing something from that. Yahoo Mail was also pretty big at the time, and combining that with Hotmail would have added greatly to Microsoft’s marketshare. Whether any of that is worth $44 billion is certainly unclear.</p>

    • glenn8878

      03 May, 2021 - 11:52 am

      <p>Yet they bought Skype and Nokia. </p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        04 May, 2021 - 6:09 am

        <p>Yes, but to be fair, those brands weren’t as tainted as AOL, at least not before Microsoft got their hands on them…</p>

  • jchampeau

    Premium Member
    03 May, 2021 - 9:26 am

    <p>Not to be pedantic, but it was America Online. There was no "N." As a teenager, I surreptitiously mocked the "old" people who put the N on. Now I’m one of those old people.</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      03 May, 2021 - 9:30 am

      It was just a spelling mistake.

      • jchampeau

        Premium Member
        03 May, 2021 - 9:31 am

        <p>Suuuuuuuuure it was, Paul. Sure it was. (Kidding, kidding….)</p>

        • jchampeau

          Premium Member
          03 May, 2021 - 9:32 am

          <p>Also, I’m totally digging this new layout for the comments.</p>

          • bettyblue

            04 May, 2021 - 8:09 am

            <p>How do you edit a comment though?</p>

  • ringofvoid

    03 May, 2021 - 9:30 am

    <p>I suspect that they paid nearly 5 billion too much but… good for Verizon?</p>

  • siverwav

    03 May, 2021 - 9:31 am

    <p>Wow who is the sucker paying 5 billion?</p>

  • Chris_Kez

    Premium Member
    03 May, 2021 - 9:58 am

    <p>Is it too much to ask that Verizon, AT&amp;T and T-Mobile just focus on being the best network carriers they can be? Get out of the content business. Be the best pipes you can be. You don’t even have to be dumb pipes; be smart pipes! But focus on that and not on content and advertising and this ancillary stuff. And if they just can’t help themselves, then perhaps we need legislation to re-orient them towards this mission.</p>

    • jchampeau

      Premium Member
      03 May, 2021 - 11:54 am

      <p>Shareholders expect growth. There’s only so much money to be made in the "pipes." In order to continue to grow their top lines, they come up with new things to generate new revenue. Philosophically I’m with you because I’m in favor of net neutrality and all of the things it protects against, but in this corrosive and divisive political climate, FTC and DOJ breaking up the likes of AT&amp;T and Comcast and telling them they have to shed all of the media businesses they’ve bought would be…uh…problematic. Simply restoring net neutrality rules with be a step in the right direction.</p>

      • behindmyscreen

        03 May, 2021 - 1:13 pm

        <p>I mean…Utility companies don’t seem to have a problem just focusing on their central function….I think the cell companies have a culture of "innovation" from the telecom industry.</p>

      • Chris_Kez

        Premium Member
        03 May, 2021 - 3:49 pm

        <p>How much <em>growth</em> should Verizon shareholders realistically expect? The US isn’t growing very fast; cell phone penetration is already very high; there are three established competitors. This is basically a mature market. Shareholders should be looking for responsible stewardship and good dividends. </p>

        • bart

          Premium Member
          03 May, 2021 - 4:40 pm

          <p>This is capitalism at work peeps. Once it worked, now its rotten to the core.</p>

    • MikeCerm

      03 May, 2021 - 1:26 pm

      <p>This is why they need to be broken up. Separate "the pipes" — which should be a public utility, like water pipes, since it is the public who owns all wireless spectrum anyway — from the for-profit businesses that transmit data over the pipes. This is how it works in a lot of countries. Rather than having 3 overlapping networks that each work better in some places than others, they have one network that covers the whole country, and then carriers just sell access to that network. </p>

  • yaddamaster

    03 May, 2021 - 10:00 am

    <p>Pretty sure it’s not even worth 5 billion.</p>

  • Gerald Michels

    Premium Member
    03 May, 2021 - 3:42 pm

    <p>I remember when AOL asked members to limit time on line because the demand was so high for access. I switched from AOL to Gmail a number of years ago. It will be interesting to see if existing AOL accounts will be preserved or changed to another system. </p>

    • simard57

      03 May, 2021 - 4:01 pm

      <p>Had the same thought. FIOS stopped hosting my verizon.net email and moved it to aol. will my verizon.net email find its way to aol still? I am glad I moved off verizon as my prime address when they stopped hosting it.</p>

  • tghallin

    Premium Member
    03 May, 2021 - 7:01 pm

    <p>The sad thing is that 2 million people can only access the internet via dial up connection. Pre competition in telecom, there were universal service requirements. They still exist for wireline, but not for anything else.</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      04 May, 2021 - 9:57 am

      It is sad. But 2 million people is literally 0.006 percent of the U.S. population.

      • IanYates82

        Premium Member
        04 May, 2021 - 11:30 pm

        <p>Maths Paul… :)</p><p><br></p><p>The US doesn’t have 33 billion people</p><p><br></p><p>Maybe 0.6% of the population – 0.33 billion (330 million) people.</p><p><br></p><p>Still not a huge percentage on its own, but much bigger than a tiny fraction of one percent.</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC