Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.
The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money".
Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.
Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street.
And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes!
I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.
YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
It isn't formally broken our in any filings though as far as I know.
Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
A lot of it is about presentation.
Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room.
A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products.
But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board.
Most innovation happens in hungrier environments.
I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
Cox Media was my first employer (it was called Cox Interactive Media at the time), Verizon Media, my current employer.
At the time, I was on the team that ran CIM's web farm which hosted the web presence for all of Cox Enterprises' newspapers, TV, and radio stations. It was a couple dozen Sun Ultras with content on NetApp filers.
We ran the farm from Atlanta and connected to it over frame relay. We were colo'd in a datacenter in Sunnyvale. We were a few racks. Yahoo had a presence in the same DC. It was a room or two, PC's running FreeBSD and also quite a few NetApps.
The biggest spike in traffic we ever saw was when the Starr Report was released.
A couple years later, I was working for Loudcloud, now living in Sunnyvale. Visiting another datacenter, I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Fir...
Today, I work as part of the mobile tools team for Verizon Media. The product I'm responsible for is hosted in a combination of AWS and Verizon Media datacenters.
In some ways, there's been a lot of changes over the years, but in other ways, not so much.
What I used to run on Solaris, today I run on Linux, sometimes on a VM or in a container, but sometimes still on a dedicated server. What I used to code in Shell or Perl or C or Java, today I code in Shell or Python or C or Java or Go or JavaScript. What I used to package into RPMs, today I package into docker images. Databases are still databases. SQL is still SQL. Application servers and web servers are still application servers and web servers. The web is still the web. Input still can't be trusted. Buffers still overflow. Applications still crash.
Same shit, different day.
sidenote: Despite the appearance those werent random consumer motherboards. Supermicro P6SBM.
Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.
…“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.”
They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion.
I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair.
Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to keep ahold of the sports bits of Yahoo, which are seemingly popular. (Perhaps that’s why they even managed to get $5 billion for…what does AOL do?)
It's funny to think that Yahoo was once thought of as an amazing stock tip to give someone. The movie came out in 2000 and was presumably written/filmed 1-2 years prior.
https://smithhousedesign.com/18-years-later-10-ironic-things...
“I am very rich. I bought Intel at $6.”
Lots of gems in that whole article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon...
…color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/buzzfeed-to-acquire-huffpost_...
How long has it been since an acquisition of either one of those companies made the acquirer any money? More than a decade?
They provide enough capital for a corporation to keep running while systematically stripping it down until only the most profitable core remains, then re-IPO'ing that husk of the company. Along the way, they make the most use of financialization to extract as much benefits as they can.
They serve a purpose in the ecosystem I guess. Its better than the company devolving into irrelevance or collapsing at once. Graceful termination means that everyone can wait for a ferry to take them away rather than jump ship.
Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?
All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all.
Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market. Secondly, that five years down the line, there is someone else who is willing to pay for the shares at a premium of what they have originally purchased for. Now what about those who are buying 5 years down the line? They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money. And so on and so forth.
So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits.
Can everyone get their worth from the shares? Not at once. Not in a hurry.
With tech this might be implicit if they are “profitable and still in the market.” But it is different than say John Deer or Miller Paint in that regard.
Or perhaps a medieval wheel of fortune.
[1]: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/539503/view/the-wheel-of-...
I'm very skeptical about that claim.
If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me.
Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )
"Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from.
So - mostly it's fraud.
The mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground, stadiums, busy downtowns, shopping centers etc. but has poor penetration and range. Verizon looks to be wanting to use is for home broadband use as well with base stations mounted all around neighborhoods. I would imagine they see it replacing WiFi with easily provisioned access points in commercial business etc.
My understanding on low band is its a overlay on their 4G network for now so it works but has almost no benefit. There supposedly is benefits to the low band side such as lower latency and better spectrum sharing over 4G but it's unclear if that applies in an overlay scenario. Moving forward they will probably bring more low /medium bands on as 5G only, perhaps finally sunsetting their 3g network and refarming as 5g only.
Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ).
It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story )
That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested.
So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )
Verizon's next 5G investment is to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, in the C-Band (mid-band, 3.7-3.98 GHz, good speed, good propagation)
VZ spent $54B on C-Band spectrum in March, then committed to spend an additional $10B over the next 3 years to deploy towers to use that spectrum, and that's above the $18B they had already planned on mid-band 5G CAPEX
VZ is taking on a lot of debt to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, and this sale will help them chip away at that huge mountain of debt
You can only blame Intel for WiMax Failure. Over Confidence, Over Hyped, poor delivery and at the time, nobody like them. I think it was 2008/9?
There is.
>He added that Apollo would allow the business to grow, a more difficult prospect when it was operating within Verizon, which was planning to spend even more money to expand its next-generation 5G wireless network.
Do they really?
I am not being sarcastic. I cannot find a recent reference to this (everything seems to be from 2015), but given my experience getting my aunt away from AOL email: it seems horribly plausible.
"If you're interested in purchasing a plan that includes dialup service, please call 1-800-827-6364 (Mon-Fri: 8am-12am ET; Sat: 8am-10pm ET)"
I would not be surprised to learn that they still have millions of dial-up customers & millions on the new non-dialup plans.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
As to dialup itself…
“The number of dial-up users is now “in the low thousands,” according to a person familiar with the matter.”
…but, yeah, it seems 1.5 million discerning customers are basically paying for AOL mail.
“There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private.”
Which: nice business if you can get it.
And Apollo will gut these entities for every dollar that they can.
Soon it’ll be Yahoo & AOL sold for an NFT of an illustration of a pile of used AOL CDs.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-americ...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americ...
… I’m not sure, but it seems plausible that if 3% had to use dialup 100% of those are on Aol (who else offers dialup?). So there’s probably a lot of money to be milked from that cash cow; along with their other ad & publishing businesses.
My parents (90's) still use AOL email, and have done so for over 25 years now. They used to use dialup, but now are on high speed internet (cable), using just the web interface for the email.
For their sake at least, I hope it doesn't go away any time soon. It works for them very well.
Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious.
For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimately have a better home than being the ugly duckling in Verizon's portfolio.
For Apollo, the benefits are obvious. There's probably lots of operational improvements to execute on, again due to the fact that Verizon was likely not really focused on these businesses. Presumably the fund will reap huge returns if they can deliver on these improvements and exit successfully and timely.
–––
EDIT: There is one more nuanced question I forgot to address: is this "really good" for the employees to? On an individual scale, probably not. I'm sure many people will be let go once Apollo is at the helm. But from a broader view, it is arguably "good" for everyone collective in the long run. Verizon really can't do much with the asset, so the alternative to selling is letting it wither away in the hopes of some miracle, with the more likely outcome being that Yahoo and AOL would become even worse shadows of their former selves with each passing day.
Eventually people would be let go anyway and those businesses could be shut down unless some miracle strategic buyer (i.e. not a private equity owner) came along and bought them. But most strategic buyers are not comfortable buying bad operations and turning them around. They find it too risky, so that's usually a job left to financial sponsors like Apollo who are built for that. In fact, these days most PEs are not even interested in turning operations around because they also find it too risky—and sponsors learned they can make more than enough money by just being great at finding sub-scale / non-core assets, putting them together in a "platform" and selling them to another sponsor or exiting through an IPO.
Also, are there any stats explaining why so Yahoo still have so many daily visitors? Is it just result of having a ton of service and then the numbers afe bundled? It seems hard to understand that pages like Yahoo (or msn.com) would attract so many users as the Alexa ranking would suggest.
It may sound like a joke or sarcasm but it’s not, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we see this AOL/Yahoo turn into some type of crypto play that can be marketed on the back of the old brands.
That arrangement would have been quite appealing for Verizon, since by this time there was likely a surplus of aging bare metal servers in Yahoo's datacenters, and these would otherwise be difficult for Verizon to monetize.
disclosure: worked for Tumblr but left long before this sale and not directly familiar with any of the specifics of the deal
Untrue.
When the goal is to buy Blogger - a goal that is being progressed towards by Automattic - money saved on the Tumblr acquisition is useful.
Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.
Apparently so. Or at least that's my distinct impression from working at a Yahoo subsidiary at the time of acquisition by Verizon. It appeared that Tim Armstrong had legitimately convinced the top Verizon execs that a combination of AOL + Yahoo would somehow create an advertising titan capable of competing with Google and Facebook.
It's quite surprising that they went through with this, given that it's a pretty ludicrous notion: a single major brand/company comeback is challenging enough in tech, but the merger of two of them at once? There's no historical precedent for that succeeding, as far as I can think. Especially with a new name as objectively terrible as "Oath".
Internally, morale was never good. It didn't help that Tim would send out weekly all-company emails that were, at best, a nonsensical word salad of business strategy jargon straight from HBO's Silicon Valley.
Literally all of the Verizon execs who were involved with this calamity are long gone now, and Verizon's previous CEO retired in 2018. My impression is the new CEO basically just wants to focus on 5G and get rid of this mess of bad acquisitions.
Sure you can, though branding isn't the only way to make a successful business. Kleenex knock-offs thrive even though nobody ever says "please hand me the Generic Tissue Paper". Assuming there are professionals involved (not just rich techbros that have held on since founding) tech companies should be operated the same as non-tech companies. Build a good product, keep costs down, drive sales, put away cash, grow your market.
Once AOL and Yahoo were acquired, it should have been possible to convert them into factories for generic content and services, and service many small brands. But you need an experienced executive and management class that can do this efficiently. It's much easier to turn an acquisition into an poorly-run independent cash cow, or plunder its IP and eliminate it.
I've seen acquisitions go many ways. In some, the parent company may end up more like the acquisition because its business or product was more robust. Other times the point was to obtain some tech and absorb it into the parent company's products. Other times they just wanted a steady cash flow and a foothold into a new market. Sometimes they keep the acquisition fairly independent, because it already has a strong brand and products and they seem to be fucking up less than other acquisitions. Sometimes the companies' execs were literally just golf buddies and one just decided to help the other out of a bind. Sometimes they have no idea why the fuck they bought it or what to do with it, some moron at the top just thought "we need an X, we'll figure out what to do with it later". Sometimes
Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute that.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is sold.
Hopefully they aren't planning to just drain hefty interest payments out of AOL/Yahoo until it goes bankrupt.
It seems like Rackspace and Cox are doing OK though, so that is a good sign?
I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but they are doing a great job of tanking it.
I've had email addresses on Rocketmail for a very long time. I always worry they will shutter this historically significant domain & email service.
One idea is the opportunity of @yahoo and @aol email addresses that people have maintained and DAUs.
Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
If you mean AIM, it was US-only for too much of its existence. Gamestop was pretty widespread in Europe, North America and Australia at least.
I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
Didn it ever make a profit?
I will always remember the HuffPo homepage masthead, which showed HRC with a 98.5% chance of victory, right up until the end. Probably didn't help her situation.
I don't see any future cashflows, incomes, dividends or even any plan for foray into new business areas.
For all intents and purposes, it's a dead company.
Still have any FreeBSD running?
Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
[1] https://vespa.ai
Vespa was extensively used for vertical search when I was there. Things like content search inside Travel, Local, Finance, Shopping, etc... was either Vespa or a predicessor. I don't think Vespa was used for the general internet search engine, but may have been used for some of the side queries that happen at the same time.
Too big to generalise. Shared tech stacks would be hard to call modern, but various tech stacks within teams were better. The more worthwhile stuff is open sourced (Athenz, Screwdriver) but there is a lot of shit internally, in varying stages of "deprecated but still the defacto solution".
> Still have any FreeBSD running?
I mean, there's probably some freebsd 7 hosts _somewhere_ and some of the internal tech stack supports it, but mostly it's RHEL6 when I left with a presumably-completed-by-now RHEL7 migration planned.
> Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
Can't comment on search, but a partner team to my old team did.
