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

Re:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[rtb61]

Let's be clear and honest, the Huffington post is far right wing, they just play to the left for views, they profit off the left, they are most definately not part of the left. Just like the pretend left indentitarians, the SJW freaks, they play left, well, they are fucking worse, they are deep state and shadow government tools, created to make the left look bad, left == workers and right == bosses, all else is a lie, put out by the bosses, just the way it is. Huffington Post, sold out to far right corporations, the second a big enough offer came in and they just gave the people who did the writing the finger and no share of hundreds of millions of dollars.

What happens when dinosaur media bought up the internet, well they tried to turn them into dinosaurs and well, it failed because dinosaurs turning new media into dinosaur media, wont save them from extinction, just take down the new media they bought.

Dinosaur media, simply failed to come to terms with the level of competition on the internet, hence the skullduggerous push for the elimination of net neutrality to create an entirely corrupt and disingenuous barrier to block competition. Problem is, well, the likes of slashdot, how much bandwidth do you need for text, not much at all and hence whilst they can try to stifle video competition, they totally fail on touching text based.

The level of global competition is also growing, look at https://www.rt.com/ or https://www.bbc.com/, their focus international news to an international audience, something for which US news media is extremely poorly equipped due to the level of empty headed bullshit and corporate propaganda flooding their channels, simply news, most people do not want to hear and who will go elsewhere at the first opportunity and you ain't seen nothing yet. The best current job for AI is auto translation services for web sites and the level of competition that will introduce for international content to an international audience will be huge and will be the downfall of US media, to used to dominating in order to adapt to mass competition, hence their solution the end of net neutrality and US internet isolation.