Once Valued at $125B, Yahoo's Web Assets To Be Sold To Verizon For $4.83B, Companies Confirm

The reports were spot on. Verizon Communications on Monday announced that it plans to purchase Yahoo's Web assets for a sum of $4.83 billion in cash. The multi-billion dollars deal will get Verizon Yahoo's core internet business and some real estate. The announcement also marks a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer, which once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion. For Verizon, the deal adds another piece to the mammoth digital media and advertising empire it owns. The deal is expected to close early 2017. CNBC reports: The transaction is seen boosting Verizon's AOL internet business, which the company acquired last year for $4.4 billion, by giving it access to Yahoo's advertising technology tools, as well as other assets such as search, mail, messenger and real estate. It also marks the end of Yahoo as an operating company, leaving it only as the owner of a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, as well as its 15 percent interest in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. In December, Yahoo scrapped plans to spin off its Alibaba stake after investors worried about whether that transaction could have been carried out on a tax-free basis. It instead decided to explore a sale of its core assets, spurred on by activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Forbes has called it one of the "saddest $5B deals in tech history."Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was expected to leave -- or get fired -- said she intends to stay. "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer said in a note on Yahoo's Tumblr page. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

Comments

Re:wait, what?

[guruevi]

They just hiked rates on their plans and are kicking their less profitable customers out. They haven't invested in new technology or speed increases for decades only begrudgingly implementing 3G speeds and then marketing it as 4G.

Re:thats

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the phenomena you are trying to refer to is called the Glass Cliff. Although, we can argue whether or not the US is a sinking ship given that it is better shape than 7 years ago.

Re: Verizon is smart to do this.

[um... Lucas]

I'm actually worried about what will happen to Yahoo Finance and their free API - I imagine a LOT of sites draw from it in some way (I'm working on one as I write this for instance).

So, there definitely is some value in there.

One of the oldest sites on the internet

[tekrat]

Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.

The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.

And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).

Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.

Re: Verizon is smart to do this.

[Karlt1]

Yahoo is still the 5th most visited site in the world....

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/...