Verizon Admits Defeat With $4.6 Billion AOL-Yahoo Writedown (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Verizon is conceding defeat on its crusade to turn a patchwork of dot-com-era businesses into a thriving online operation. The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6 billion, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit. The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post. The revision of the Oath division's accounting leaves its goodwill balance -- a measure of the intangible value of an acquisition -- at about $200 million, Verizon said in a filing Tuesday. The unit still has about $5 billion of assets remaining. Verizon also announced yesterday that 10,400 employees are taking buyouts to leave the company. The cuts are "part of an effort to trim the telecom giant's workforce ahead of its push toward 5G," TechCrunch reported.

Comments

Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Desler]

Yeah who couldn't see that a bunch of zombie corpses were worthless? Oh wait, anyone with half a brain did.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[mishehu]

And I've known of the pending workforce reduction (aka voluntary firings) for a bit now, as one of my friends took the offer and was talking about it. I already smelled a major loss on the horizon. Whatever happened to telecom companies focusing on telecom services?

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to telecom companies focusing on telecom services?

Months ago I had a Verizon service outage (land line and internet). Estimated time to repair: NINE days.

I immediately signed up for internet with the cable company, and closed my account with Verizon (didn't really need the landline anyhow).

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[HornWumpus]

How many out of the money puts did you buy?

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Locke2005]

If you have internet, you can get the equivalent of a landline over internet (e.g. OOMA) for about 1/10 the cost.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[mishehu]

How many out of the money puts did you buy?

I'm not sure how to answer that. Mostly because I'm not sure what you're asking.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[HornWumpus]

An out of the money put option is (more or less) a bet that a company will lose value. If you know a company is going to tank and you can point to publicly available information that told you that, you're golden.

An out of the money put will allow you to sell the stock at a 'strike price' (below the current price...'out of the money') at some future date. You pay a premium up front for that. That premium is calculated using 'bookie methods'.

Short answer: Legal high odds gambling on stock prices with a fixed downside. Better than owning 'shorts'.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah who couldn't see that a bunch of zombie corpses were worthless? Oh wait, anyone with half a brain did.

I wanted to go to their annual shareholder's where they were to announce that purchase and speak out on how crazy ti was to waste that money on Yahoo! and the likelihood of lawsuits from it's past problems but I could not get there.

Would have worth the price of 1 share of stock just to have the right to "speak truth" to the board and be on the record for it.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[mishehu]

If only I had money to gamble like that. Alas at the moment I don't. If I did I would have looked into that. In the meantime, I have to wait for Eyegore gets back with my normal brain and takes back Abby Normal's....

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Bradac_55]

It's called 5G they get to be ISP's and content creators if they can get the government to foot most of the $11 Trillion price tag to blanket the USA in massive MIMO towers.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[mishehu]

Ah yes, 5G is the panacea. And surely they only want $11 trillion from the gov't in order to not cover the entire country.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[jpaine619]

It might be close, but it's not the equivalent. During an electrical outage landline phones still work. They're self powered. During an electrical outage your internet isn't going to work.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[jpaine619]

Unless it's preferred stock, they don't have to let you speak about anything. They don't even have to let you attend.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[ArhcAngel]

During an electrical outage landline phones still work. They're self powered.

They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Even a cheap UPS will power your router & ip-phone for days - if you live in a part of the world where electrical outages is a problem.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[randomErr]

Yeah who couldn't see that a bunch of zombie corpses were worthless? Oh wait, anyone with half a brain did.

I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.

AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messages and you would have had AOL Facebook.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great. You'll run through your cap in 4 seconds instead of 120 if you accidentally download anything.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[jpaine619]

They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.

Do you know what self powered means? I worked for the telcos. They have batteries (you were correct there), LOTS of batteries. They also have generators. Usually quite large generators. (megawatt) The telco generates its own power during a mains outage. That's what I meant when I said self-powered. I suspect you know that...

Cable TV nodes / switches / hardware, in my experience, are NOT self powered. Case in point, down here every time SDG&E has an outage Cox cable will go offline in the same area. I will not profess to know how the cable companies run things, but from what I have experienced they are dependent on mains power. Maybe I'm wrong and something else is happening, but I don't think so. I am more than happy to be educated on the subject though.

Lastly, you say "the telco will go down if they don't have a generator", well what the hell do you think is going to happen to that UPS? It's life is measured in minutes.. maybe hours if you have a really good one..

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[ArhcAngel]

Lighten up Francis...

I've worked with my fair share of telco as well. AFAIK the substation's generators will not help the VRAD once its battery packs are depleted. I'd be happy to be educated if this is not the case. As for how cablecos do it...as cheap as possible and still avoid a class action lawsuit. After TS Allison my next door neighbor who had Comcast was without service for six months! And we weren't even in a flooded area. Can't say enough bad things about cable.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[HornWumpus]

If you do it right, it's not gambling. But you need to pass a test (proving you understand what you are doing) and have a couple of thousand dollar balance with your broker.

Keeps the riffraff from using the option market as a lottery, which might undercut the state run tax on people bad at math.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Agripa]

They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.

Both the FTTN DSL and cable ISPs where I am fail during power outages even though my modem and local network are completely backed up which is especially annoying because my POTs phone connection comes through the modem.

When I had DSL over POTs, then the self powered POTs phone still worked.

I assume the FCC regulation is that services which are required for POTs are suppose to be backed up but who wants to change the batteries in the cabinets every year? U-Verse had a bunch of cabinet fires when it was first installed.

Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars

[Agripa]

I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.

AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messages and you would have had AOL Facebook.

Yahoo was destroying their chat services before they were purchased. It was big talk in the groups I participated in and they all moved to alternates many of which specifically implemented ways to transfer the contents off.

They should fire everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean pay them to leave.

Really?

[grep -v '.*' *]

Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post ... [has a $4.6 Billion Writedown.]

Oath? More like Ooof.

And V now owns the Huffington .*? *I* didn't know that. But I can't lose them -- how will I know what my default position is on anything? (BTW, My default position is exactly 180 degrees from them. If they say the Earth is round I'm immediately starting out a Flat Earther. And that's only when I hear about them from echos.)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they say the Earth is round I'm immediately starting out a Flat Earther." - You aren't supposed to admit that. You're cementing yourself as a reactionary trollish idiot. That's a mistake.

You're supposed to pretend to have an open mind, and black friends, GOP nutters. You're supposed to try to pretend you're not a nazi.

Re:Really?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I don't know a lot about Oath, but I have noticed that since they bought out Engadget the site is inaccessible a fair bit of the time. Its preferred method of falling-over seems to be redirecting any story link to a login screen - was like that for days, until just recently (and this wasn't the first time).

Re:Really?

[Desler]

It's amazing how so many people are proud to be a modern-day know-nothing.

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is a nazi

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

When they get hanged, perhaps.

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

No there are plenty of anti-Nazis.

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO all too many anti-nazis are the real nazis

Re:Really?

[Bradac_55]

Engadget's still around?

Re:Really?

[jpaine619]

Ya know, you're a fucking idiot. Equating someone with a different ideological view to a group of people who ACTUALLY killed 6 million Jews, millions of Russians, and uncountable numbers of homos and gypsies paints you as a complete fuckhead.

I get you may have serious disagreements with folks on the right (hell, I have serious disagreements with folks on the left), but you are an asshole and you paint yourself as another lefty liberal twat who doesn't understand that things have DEGREES. If you come across someone who thinks Hilter was awesome, by all means call them a Nazi. But until that happens, how about you act like you have a goddamn brain and can tell the difference between someone with different political views and someone who favors genocide?

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of calling people you disagree with a Nazi is that you then paint them as evil so you can do anything you want to them. Like zombies or brain eating aliens, all Nazis deserve to die.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Democrat party is the party of slavery, Jim Crow and the KKK.
  - Dinesh D'Souza, "Death of a Nation"

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly it's so you don't have to argue anymore. Almost always done because you have run out of arguments. It's an admission of defeat, which was the very reason why Godwin made his little rule.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quote from a criminal, how apt!

Why did they buy HuffPo?

[known_coward_69]

It's essentially a website that posts links to real news and summarizes them with a liberal slant. Leftist version of Breitbart

Re: Why did they buy HuffPo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that what is known as mad money or is this just another typical interwebz loss update?

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, they are a non-techie slashdot?

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[alvinrod]

Because there're loads of people who want their opinions formed for them (regardless of what their political ideology is) and are more than happy to lap up content like this, which is also conveniently cheap to produce since you can just hire a bunch of low cost recent graduates who will work for chicken scratch because of the dearth of jobs in news media at respectable publications.

I'm surprised they even need staff at any of these places. It seems like you could train a bot to trot out the same old talking points article after article.

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Slashdot

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[Anonymous Coward]

" website that posts links to real news " - Well, that would be a step up for Breitbart to be honest, slant or no slant... but I agree, Huffpo is crappy.

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[mermeid007]

yeah - they need something like a citation for us programmers

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[slashdice]

Leftist version of Breitbart

Literally. Huffington Post was co-founded by Ariana Huffington and ... Andrew Breitbart.

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Curiously, Ariana was a staunch conservative Republican for most of her life. She supported traditional family values, including being against feminism. She wrote for right wing publicans and supported the Republican Revolution pushed by Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole to take Congress away from the Democrats. She even called for Bill Clinton to resign.

Ariana became liberated in the early 2000s.

what they were thinking?

[kiviQr]

If they have asked anyone on this forum we would help them save $4.6B for a minimal fee long time ago.

Re: what they were thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Loooooool exactly. I'm loving it!

Re:what they were thinking?

[Desler]

The smart money would've been allowing Microsoft to buy Yahoo. Although, Verizon did way over pay on the zombie corpse. Jerry Yang was quite the idiot.

Re:what they were thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why they would write down 4.6B. Yahoo's revenues prior to the purchase was something like $1+B a year. Even without growth, you are supposed to be able to get apply about 3-4x multiplier to the revenue to get the current value of a company.

Re:what they were thinking?

[Desler]

The write-down still leaves it valued at around $5 billion. That's still more than the multiplier you state.

Re:what they were thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think devaluing AOL would increase goodwill, not diminish it.

I'll just bet...

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

...some people at Verizon were swearing mighty... oaths? LOL

Re:I'll just bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

...some people at Verizon were swearing mighty... oaths? LOL

You know it! That money could have been spent on network upgrades at wireless, wireline, and so on but now the honchos "cry poor" and cut back capital spending!

Remember Microsoft offered 34 Billion for Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a thief, charlie brown.

Tumblr

[Daetrin]

So Verizon/Oath announce on Dec 3rd that Tumblr, one of the companies under the banner of Oath, will ban anything "pornographic". By the end of that day their stock has dropped $2 a share. Verizon has 4.13 billion shares outstanding. That's a value loss of $8.26 billion. A week later they cut the value of Oath by $4.6 billion.

Seems like they might actually be underselling(?) the loss?

Re:Tumblr

[zlives]

i am sure there is always the next year writedowns

That was fast

[Snotnose]

Much like the Time Warner-AOL deal some 20 years ago, I don't know a single person that thought that was a good idea. At least it took 5-6 years for it to unravel.

Wasn't it just last year VZ completed their deal? And does anyone know anyone who thought it was a smart thing to do? Cuz I sure don't, everyone I talked to said VZ were idiots.

Makes one wonder what goes on in those CXX suites while the worker bees wonder who will lose their jobs.

Re:That was fast

[Desler]

The real idiots were Jerry Yang and company who turned down Steve Ballmer's offer of tens of billions to buy Yahoo. They could've bilked so much more out of Microsoft and Verizon ended up paying.

Re:That was fast

[dejitaru]

And does anyone know anyone who thought it was a smart thing to do?

Tim Armstrong. I don't remember where I read the article, I believe it was when he announced his resignation, but his goal/hope was for Verizon to spin off Oath into a separate company after the merger of AOL & Yahoo, essentially turning it into a massive media company to compete with others like Google. Verizon didn't though, hence his resignation at the end of the year.

Re:That was fast

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Much like the Time Warner-AOL deal some 20 years ago, I don't know a single person that thought that was a good idea

I know some people who thought it was a great idea and they were right. Of course, they owned AOL stock at the time...

Re:That was fast

[ShanghaiBill]

The real idiots were Jerry Yang and company who turned down Steve Ballmer's offer of tens of billions to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft offered Yahoo $44.6B. They later sold out to Verizon for $4.8B. Now they are worth $0.2B.

After Jerry rejected the deal and Microsoft walked away, many people wondered what Jerry's plan was. It turned out that he had no plan, no ideas, nothing. The company just continued to spiral the drain.

At least Jerry lost his job for that blunder.

Re:That was fast

[whoever57]

Much like the Time Warner-AOL deal some 20 years ago, I don't know a single person that thought that was a good idea.

That was a really great deal ..... for AOL shareholders. No so much for anyone else.

Re:That was fast

[Desler]

At least Jerry lost his job for that blunder.

Unfortunately, so did thousands of his subordinates.

Re:That was fast

[grep -v '.*' *]

Microsoft offered Yahoo $44.6B. They later sold out to Verizon for $4.8B. [That's a delta of "only" $40B, enough for most people to notice.]

Jesus. That's got to look great on a resume.

Interview: "And what was do you think was your greatest accomplishment at your last company?" "Well, I sold the entire company for nearly $5B dollars."
"Nice. And your greatest failure?" "(Sweating) Ummm, I didn't order comfy enough chairs for everyone."

Re:That was fast

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a multi-millionaire that got a multi-million dollar golden parachute after that blunder. I'm sure he's crying in piles of 100$ bills.

Re:That was fast

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for karma whoring on the OP comment. You added nothing. Moron.

Re:That was fast

[Eravnrekaree]

But Microsoft may have gone bankrupt and today wouldnt be making contributions to Linux kernel and becoming an open source company.

Here's my "Oath"

[david.emery]

Fucking Brilliant!

Tumblr's in there too

[Anonymous Coward]

...Which they're currently self-destructing with the porn ban.

"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

Mergers of larger tech-related companies seem to always fail. Can anyone name a success in the last 2 decades?

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Desler]

Next + Apple?

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Desler]

Although that technically is just passed two decades ago, I guess.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Anonymous Coward]

Charter / Time Warner

AT&T / Direct TV?

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[HornWumpus]

Apple is doing pretty good selling rebadged NextStep computers.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

Next arguably wasn't "big". They pretty much had one product. Big companies typically have hundreds of products. And the Next computer was a flop. If there was any net benefit, it was that Steve got a crew he knew and helped pick to work for Apple, and possibly some OS-related IP.

Okay, I'll compromise and give that example half a credit.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[HornWumpus]

Apple had tried and failed twice to write their own decent OS.

They bought Next after being asked to pay an insane price for Bee. Bee got a big old finger instead. Like Yahoo turning down MS, Bee did an epic fail.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Desler]

There was more net benefit than you mention. They went from being a dying company to one that has hundreds of billions in cash and jostles for the highest-valued company in the world.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Anonymous Coward]

NextSTEP --> OS X --> iPhone

good deal

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Anonymous Coward]

Broadcom + Avago
It was very much a success from financial point of view. A lot of fat was cut and company is better over all.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Mergers of larger tech-related companies seem to always fail. Can anyone name a success in the last 2 decades?

Well, if we exclude the content consolidation driven by the desire to own the streaming market, e..g Disney/Fox, as "non-tech-related", we are still left with of choices:

• Facebook/Instagram
• Facebook/WhatsApp
• Microsoft/Skype
• Microsoft/Mojang
• Apple/Next
• Apple/Beats
• Google/Android
• Google/YouTube
• Google/Doubleclick
• Google/Nest (okay, jury's still out)
• Blizzard/Activision
• Amazon/Twitch
• Amazon/Audible.com

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[pz]

That was more than two decades ago.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Desler]

It was 21 years ago. You make it sound like it was 40 years ago b

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

There was more net benefit than you mention. They went from being a dying company to one that has hundreds of billions...

That's probably because Steve Jobs became the CEO, not because of Next itself.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

I'd argue most of those are not "big", but rather purchased specialists. Most of MS-Office and VB were from purchased smallish companies who mode the original software titles, for example.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[casualgeek]

More acquisitions than mergers, but successful nonetheless: Google + YouTube (in hindsight a very good one), Facebook + Instagram (1 billion seemed ludicrous at the time. Looks like a bargain now), Google + Android, Microsoft + Skype

Re: "Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Midnight Thunder]

Most devices at Apple share the shared heritage of the original MacOS and OpenStep. MacOS as we know today was essentially a reskined version of OpenStep. The OS at the core of the iPhone, the Apple Watch and MacOS are all based on what came from NeXT. Without that the Mac would be dead.

Yes Steve Jobs being CEO was certainly important, but so too was the software he brought with him.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Anonymous Coward]

Mergers of larger tech-related companies seem to always fail. Can anyone name a success in the last 2 decades?

It depends upon whom you ask. I'm sure that the investment bankers and law firms who advised the merging companies and arranged the financing are very satisfied with the fat fees that they received for their services. So it was a success for the lawyers and the bankers if not the shareholders.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

Charter / Time Warner

AT&T / Direct TV?

Technically, yes, in terms of profits. But it's because those co's get oligopolier when they merge, not better. They essentially were buying away competition. You wouldn't call them "better" after, would you?

When DirectTV announced they had Internet available in our area, I was ready to jump at the chance because the other 2 ISP/cable co's suck eggs bigly. Then I read about the merger, and said un-family-oriented words.

Re: "Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

Without that the Mac would be dead.

We don't know that. That's mere speculation. Perhaps Apple would borrow even more Unix & OSS if Next not around.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Tablizer]

Let me rework the last sentence: Most of MS-Office and MS Visual Basic came from Microsoft purchasing specific software titles and sometimes the entire company that made them. They were small companies, which doesn't fit my original criteria.

Re:"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Actually, I do RTFA]

If you don't think Activision/Blizzard was big enough, I'm not sure your sense of scale. And, frankly, I'm not sure what would qualify. AOL/TimeWarner wasn't two tech companies. Maybe Verizion/Yahoo? I mean, Google/DoubleClick were two huge companies at the time, although both are much smaller than what Alphabet is now.

Re: "Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times

[Midnight Thunder]

Without that the Mac would be dead.

We don't know that. That's mere speculation. Perhaps Apple would borrow even more Unix & OSS if Next not around.

It is speculation, but the next best alternative was BeOS and from what I know of it, it didn't seem like a great option. The Unix underpinnings of OpenStep was a very real strength and combining that with a generally good UI and top level stack was another strength. Adding Steve Jobs into the mix further helped cement the advantages. I am not convinced that Jean-Louis Gassée would have been the right person for the job?

Developing an operating system is hard. Developing a great operating system takes many iterations, and therefore years. Apple was not in a position to plan for many years.

One article comparing BeOS to OpenStep: http://lowendmac.com/myturn/02...

They have to have known Yahoo was worthless

[rsilvergun]

the whole thing stinks. I'm guessing somebody made out like a bandit and left somebody else (probably smaller shareholders) holding the bag.

Re:They have to have known Yahoo was worthless

[phantomfive]

They were trying to build a presence in the video advertising world (because video ads are worth a LOT more than static ads, which is why everyone and their dog is trying to create "original content"). Verizon couldn't buy the Google or Facebook, so they tried to buy up several of the smaller players and combine them to create a competitor. Obviously it didn't really work.

Re:They have to have known Yahoo was worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

So business as usual in our Capitalistic World economy then?

Re:They have to have known Yahoo was worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Way ahead of ther curve, they had broadcast.com but fumbled badly, even almost a decade before youtube.

a defeat? No, a victory for accounting!

[Anonymous Coward]

With this big write off, Verizon might not be paying any taxes, yet again!

Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo needs to go away and die, in the sands of time. It was once a giant, but it's utterly useless today, as is the AOL brand.