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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."

40 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Verizon is smart to do this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is nothing sweeter than those juicy Geocities page views. That's the crown jewel as far as I'm concerned.

    1. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yahoo is fifteen year old irrelevant garbage. Their search engine is junk and just littered with ads. They aren't worth 4.3 thousand let alone billion. Their site looks like a 1998 Netscape demo.

    2. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ah. I'd assumed Verizon were getting paid to take them.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by um...+Lucas · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      ^ This.

      Proof:

      Yahoo homepage vs Google homepage history

      --
      Slashtard / Redditard, noun, Someone too immature / ignorant / stupid to understand the down-vote is NOT "I disagree" but rather "this post adds nothing interesting to the discussion."

    5. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by Karlt1 · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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

  2. Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by bloodhawk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think much of Verizon but I would be fucking shocked if Meyers arse isn't on the sidewalk 10 seconds after it goes through. Yahoo was on its way down, but she put the peddle to the floor and accelerated it into oblivion.

    1. Re:Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Jahta · · Score: 5, Funny

      "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."

      Presumably she means Chapter 11.

    2. Re: Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm sure the participation trophy CEO will be just fine. All the people who actually work there whose lives got ruined are another story but in the US workers are irrelevant anyway to most people including other workers.

    3. Re:Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Bearhouse · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're right, she should go, having added no value. But I'm sure she negotiated a sweet deal with stakeholders as part of the overall package.
      (BTW, this is not an anti-fem rant; plenty of good female and bad male bosses out there, and while I'm here let me extend a hearty "fuck you" to all the SJWs trying to ruin /.)
      Back on topic, quite what she means by "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter..." one can only speculate.
      Selling the remaining minority interests they have? That'll be done by the bankers, my dear, they don't need you.
      Talking of banks, she's crying all the way to one:
      Salary $117 million over 5 years; $36.6 million for first six months.
      Net worth US$500 million

    4. Re:Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by StormReaver · · Score: 2

      She will stay exactly long enough for her golden parachute to deploy, then she will D.B. Cooper the place.

  3. wait, what? by ihtoit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Where did Verizon find 5 billion in *cash*?? Inside the mattress??

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    1. Re:wait, what? by guruevi · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    2. Re: wait, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Bullshit. What you meant to say is that corporations might actually have to pay taxes to the nation that enables them to work internationally in the first place. We guard their overseas assets with our military, threaten any leaders of countries who think their assets should benefit their people, and generally allow them to externalize costs and internalize profits.

      Corporations need to be made to behave and pay their own expenses. That they're not being made to is why the world is fucked.

    3. Re:wait, what? by MikeDataLink · · Score: 2

      They sold their FiOS business to Frontier Communications for billions.

      --
      Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
  4. Re:thats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Next chapter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

    I guess she means Chapter 11...

  6. Re:Selling for $5B is sexist by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow! A whole 10%! What a disaster...oh by the way, you were subsidizing the poors healthcare anyway. Where do you think it came from? The magic fairy tree?

  7. Re:Marissa Mayer can't leave by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Twitter should be the next one to watch. They've only got around $550m in assets and just blew $200m on a tech company to fold into theirs, that of course led to a very small stock bump of around $1.25/share, which is already declining. Keep in mind they're burning through around $125m yearly in losses. Anyone want to take a bet who will buy them up? I can't think of any company that would, especially with the self-imposed trashing of their own brand they've been going on for the last year.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...
  8. Re:thats by GrumpySteen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) Fiorina has not declared bankruptcy.
    2) HP did not declare bankruptcy under Fiorina.
    3) Hillary Clinton has not had to declare bankruptcy.

    Meanwhile, Trump has had four bankruptcies and is the subject of multiple class action suits over the scam that was Trump University.

    If the only choice is between a disaster that doesn't bankrupt the country and an apocalypse that does, I'll take the disaster.

  9. Saddest = Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Melissa will get a big bonus most likely paid by the new owners, because they'll have paid her a bonus to encourage her to do the deal.
    Very similar to the deal Elop got for gutting Nokia, locking it into a Microsoft world where it was doomed to fail and yet he got a big fat bonus (paid from the *merged* company, i.e. from Microsoft) for doing the deed.

    To me Nokia was far sadder, it went from the top slot in the smartphone industry to virtually bankrupt in the space of one obviously malicious CEO. Whereas Yahoo was vapour valuation to less vapour in one obviously incompetent CEO.

    http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html

    1. Re:Saddest = Nokia by Shatrat · · Score: 2

      Don't confuse Nokia handsets with Nokia. Nokia itself is alive and well and had about $25 billion in revenue last year. The handset business was spun off to Microsoft because Microsoft was willing to write a big check. Making money on handsets is pretty hard if you don't have either a walled garden store (Apple) or make the actual components like processors, memory, screens (Samsung). Otherwise margins are very thin relative to Nokia's actual network products aimed at carriers.

      --
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  10. Re:thats by Keick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fact is neither Clinton nor Trump have ever declared personal bankruptcy.

    Yes at least 4 businesses owned/run by Donald Trump have filed bankruptcy, and likely a few more.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

    But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500. That's a whole lot of successes for relatively few failures. Even conservatively, 95% of his businesses were/are successful.

    http://qz.com/461688/a-list-of...

    So your choice is really; Some loud mouth bozo with a 95% success rate in running businesses of all types, or a useless puppet with not a single success in her life.

  11. Re:thats by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

    1) Fiorina has not declared bankruptcy. 2) HP did not declare bankruptcy under Fiorina. 3) Hillary Clinton has not had to declare bankruptcy.

    Meanwhile, Trump has had four bankruptcies and is the subject of multiple class action suits over the scam that was Trump University.

    If the only choice is between a disaster that doesn't bankrupt the country and an apocalypse that does, I'll take the disaster.

    Agreed. It is the height of dumbshittedness for males to point to any female top executive that has failed or is failing and declare that is some sort of proof that females cannot lead or are otherwise unsuited because of their gender.

    Certainly Yahoo's problems were well in place before Mayer ever showed up.

    Fiorina is a bad CEO, as witnessed by her trying to make her way as a political candidate, where many of her traits that caused problems at HP have shown up, which is an inability to alter course or change her mind when given irrefutable proof that she is wrong. Which is not remotely a female trait - history is littered with men with the same issue.

    And who would even know about Clinton? Once you have that last name, there are people who will attempt to use any infraction and amp it up, and take much worse actions performed by their preferred political leaders and outright ignore them. Interestingly enough, before she showed presidential aspirations, she was generally admired and dare we say liked by Republican colleagues. Now Behghazi is called the worst disaster ever, ignoring the orders of magnitude more embassy attacks and deaths during the first 8 years of this century, and what was at best a security violation now merits a call for imprisonment, the attack dogs just make it difficult to assess her actual performance.

    But back to the subject, given that the vast number of bankruptcies and poor business management is performed by males, it probably isn't a good idea to point at Mayer and declare Yahoo's problems at base are because she is female.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  12. Re:Selling for $5B is sexist by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow! A whole 10%! What a disaster...oh by the way, you were subsidizing the poors healthcare anyway. Where do you think it came from? The magic fairy tree?

    For all of the bluff and bluster of the anti-Romneycare folks, the USA was in a positive feedback loop of the poorest using emergency rooms as basic healthcare - the most expensive healthcare in the world. The costs were passed up the foodchain, and as you note, subsidized by us via larger insurance premiums. What was happening was as the premiums were increasing the people who were increasingly unable to afford healthcare was increasing, which was moving more to the emergency room model of healthcare, which was then charged upwards .......

    The health insurance system in use was going to die in a few years, and we would have ended up with the weirdest Universal healthcare system imaginable.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  13. Re:thats by lexman098 · · Score: 2

    What lawsuits? The "Clinton University" was (is?) basically a program where they get prominent people to speak at real universities. There's no tuition.

    Trump University scammed people into paying tuition for what they though were going to be classes that would give them useful business skills. This is very similar to other for-profit university scams.

  14. One of the oldest sites on the internet by tekrat · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:One of the oldest sites on the internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      More like DNS wasnt a thing in whatever world you lived in... DNS (early mid 80's) was in use far before HTTP (late 80s/early 90's) existed. The yahoo/lycos/ask jeeves sites (mid 90's) didn't exist until after HTTP was more widely used.

    2. Re:One of the oldest sites on the internet by operagost · · Score: 2

      Your network stack or your ISP was defective. DNS existed on ARPANET in the 1980s, and I used fully qualified host names in the early 1990s to access hosts via TELNET and FTP before Yahoo even existed. Otherwise, you're correct.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    3. Re:One of the oldest sites on the internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      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)

      Hard to say, would guess you are either an unemployed IT staffer or an IT Director.

    4. Re:One of the oldest sites on the internet by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 2

      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.

      I remember everything you said except the "access Yahoo by an IP address" (or that "DNS wasn't a thing then").

  15. Summary is jacked by justthinkit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Current Yahoo shareholders will keep the company's lucrative investments in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. They will be spun into a separate, yet-to-be-named, publicly traded company. The deal also excludes some patents and Yahoo's cash.

    In short, the deal doesn't include Alibaba shares, which are the lion's share of Yahoo!'s value. So, mentioning the $125B value in the summary, not clarifying what the deal is, but saying the deal is for $5B, is ...pretty typical for a Slashdot summary.

    --
    I come here for the love
    1. Re:Summary is jacked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I thought the $125 billion evaluation was of its core business back around the year 2000 or so, and predated the Alibaba investment. So the core business was valued at $125 billion, now the core business is valued around $5 billion. Neither number includes Alibaba.

  16. Re:thats by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500.

    "Owns" and "runs" are two very different things, as are "bought a going concern", "rescued a failing business" and "started something from scratch". If the ones that went bankrupt where the ones he started and ran personally, and the others were just ones he owns a stake in but doesn't have much to do with the day-to-day operation of...

    I'm just sayin', I don't actually have the figures or anything.

    It's also worth looking at the number of other transactions that have failed, like real-estate purchases that lost money or failed to deliver anything. His university seems like a massive scam too, which makes me think calling Hilary a crook is a bit rich, pardon the pun.

    --
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    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  17. Re:thats by CaptainLard · · Score: 2

    >But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500. That's a whole lot of successes for relatively few failures. Even conservatively, 95% of his businesses were/are successful.

    Interesting statistic. I'd like to see some further analysis done on it though (yeah I'm not going to be the one to do it). "trump" is a branding enterprise. I'd say that list has a very loose definition of "runs". You really think one person can run 500 businesses effectively? That's just enough time to tell each of them "gimme lower cost and MOAR profit" once a quarter. I'm qualified for that!

    My guess is for 99% of it, trump probably walked into (or phoned into...yeah just realized he loves to literally phone it in) a room where *somehotel approached him about a marketing license and he gave a quick speil about "winner" and "luxury" and "best brain". His team took the initiative to draw up a contract listing trump as an executive and added the proverbial notch onto his belt and forgot about the whole thing until he needed stump speech material. The people actually running it are doing well enough that this plan has worked pretty well although I'd be surprised if he is worth 1/4 of what he claims, which is still a lot but also tells me all I need to know about him.

  18. What's the plan here? by nine-times · · Score: 2

    So Verizon bought AOL, and now they're buying Yahoo. What's next? Are they going to buy Compuserve, Prodigy, Lycos, or Excite?

    But really, what's the plan here? I find it a little frightening that Verizon's strategy seems to be to acquire whatever large content sources they can get their hands on. They (and Comcast) have given some indications that they'd like to leverage their control over infrastructure to push their own content and services.

  19. Re:thats by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, I'm not planning on voting for Trump and would prefer that no one did, but I'd have to ask, of those businesses that Trump went bankrupt on, perhaps all four of them were phone-ins too?

    The business world does have ups and downs, and if you're a major player you're going to have them. Even Warren Buffett has the occasional bankruptcy in one or two of his holdings.

    So, I think I agree that using something like the four bankruptcies (which in this case were Chapter 11 reorganizations, not liquidations), against Trump is magnifying a certain expected level of failure or error into a big deal. If he really does have 500 investments, then is four bankruptcies actually a big deal?

    I actually think Trump needs to be taken very seriously as someone who knows exactly what they are doing, and I'd probably vote for Clinton if I didn't think she'd only make the problem worse. And that's a big deal, because I think the Democratic party platform is divisive and pandering, just like the Republican party platform, they just have fewer rednecks. Electing her is going to keep the pressure cooker from exploding one more term or two, but that just means the explosion is going to be even greater when she's done. She has nothing to help with this current situation, and the DNC mails only show the level of tone-deafness that her and the rest of the Democratic party are experiencing.

  20. Re:thats by tnk1 · · Score: 2

    3) Hillary Clinton has not had to declare bankruptcy

    That's like saying that I've never declared bankruptcy. I haven't, but I've never actually run a major business, and neither has she.

    And Fiorina, while probably preferable to Trump, was someone who thought that losing a Senatorial election meant that now she was qualified to run for a Presidential contest as well. It was like she had this script in her head about

    1. Run HP successfully
    2. Win Senate Election
    3. Become President

    And no one bothered to mention to her that she hadn't actually accomplished either of the first two steps before trying the third one.

  21. Re:Healthcare Reagan style by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

    True. The problem of course, is that very often the traits that make for a good physician are not those that make for a good social conservative. Doctors do have a tendency to want to treat sick people.

    For free? No, for cold, hard cash. A doctor still works in his self interest. Don't kid yourself, we all have to eat. You just want to eat on someone else's dime.

    Oh so very clever, to take may statement and say that I'm saying that Doctors work for nothing.

    That is so incredibly weak, most trolls wouldn't think of it.

    This is going to be shocking, so cover the kids ears.

    Not everyone adheres to the concept of I don't give a fuck unless I'm getting wealthy, and if you don't pay me, you can FOAD. Some people are actually nice to others without being paid for it. That doesn't mean they don't want paid, it just means that they don't connect the two.

    And don't for a minute thing that the farthest right leaning social conservative doesn't have a bucket list of things that people are supposed to do for them on others dimes.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  22. All of this has happened before by Solandri · · Score: 2

    All of it will happen again. Before Yahoo (before the Web actually), there was a Veronica which did a fairly reasonable job of cataloging the big gopher sites. And before that, there was an ftp site (can't recall the name) which tried to mirror most of the content hosted on other popular ftp sites (and was eventually displaced by Archie).

    Yahoo foundered because their core web search was built on people hand-picking what should be the best results for a search term. I remember trying to find a decent car mechanic in Boston, and being able to drill down their indexing tree for businesses, Massachusetts, Boston, car mechanics. And there was a list of repair shops who'd either registered themselves with Yahoo, or someone else had taken the time to add an entry for them. AltaVista gave that tedious indexing job to a computer, with mixed results since computers don't understand context or what people find valuable. Google succeeded because they realized the very structure of the web itself (i.e. number of links to a site) gave them that context - what sites other people found valuable.