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.

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[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?

"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

[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: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: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: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.

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:Why did they buy HuffPo?

[slashdice]

Leftist version of Breitbart

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

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

[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.