[HN Gopher] Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
___________________________________________________________________
Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B
Author : mishftw
Score : 253 points
Date : 2021-05-03 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I still think Yahoo is not worth 5 billion. Sure, it makes some
| revenue from mail and ads, yahoo mail is essentially the AOL of
| our generation. Ppl hanging onto it and the new kids dont even
| know about yahoo.
| utopcell wrote:
| They made $1.9BN just this quarter.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Do you have their annual statements? I could not find any
| beyond the 2017 sec filing. Yahoo has been only marginally
| profitable for many years now.
|
| 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.
| utopcell wrote:
| Yahoo is the 8th most visited property in the world [1] and
| still brings in billions in revenue. Pretty good for a
| "dead" entity.
|
| [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-
| website...
| kumarvvr wrote:
| As per your link, Yahoo has about 4 Billion monthly
| visitors.
|
| Average Click-Through-Rate for web ads is about 0.5%.
|
| That translates to about 20 million ad clicks per month.
|
| Average Cost-Per-Click is about 0.5 USD, meaning Yahoo
| earns about 10 Million dollars from ad clicks.
|
| Lets triple it, considering exclusive deals, ad deals,
| etc. So thats 30 M USD per month, or about 360 M USD per
| year.
|
| Still is it worth about 5 B USD?
|
| Also note that this is current rates. Internet is a
| finicky business where if you drop off the radar of the
| most active users, you will lose revenue very quick.
|
| So the risk adjustment factors for companies like Yahoo
| will likely be very high.
| utopcell wrote:
| $360M in profit wouldn't translate to a "dead" entity,
| but if we're to focus on your numbers then Google (that
| has 24.4X more monthly visitors) would be earning about
| $2.9B to $8.8B per year from ad clicks. As in most cases:
| garbage in, garbage out.
|
| Why is it important for you to call Yahoo "dead" ?
| sfblah wrote:
| Visitors visit more than one page per "monthly visit."
| Multiply your entire analysis by something like 5 or 10.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Does this include Yahoo Japan or is that already a separate
| entity? Yahoo is BIG in Japan, with Yahoo Auctions being what
| Ebay is in other countries.
| zkid18 wrote:
| Yahoo Japan is a Softbank-owned co
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Yahoo Japan has long been a separate entity.
| bdcravens wrote:
| "This next evolution of Yahoo will be the most thrilling yet"
|
| I'm very skeptical about that claim.
| pfortuny wrote:
| You should take into account the meaning of "thriller".
| lfowles wrote:
| Turn it back into a curated online directory :)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ strikes again:)
| soco wrote:
| "thrilling" as in "causing great emotional or mental
| stimulation" could mean actually anything, like pondering where
| you could quickly move your decades of stored emails...
| rchaud wrote:
| Considering that that's the only part of the memo they quoted,
| I imagine the rest of it was even more vague.
| DogOnTheWeb wrote:
| Especially since it's coming from the guy who just sold Yahoo,
| and he's not going with it.
| Animats wrote:
| Good. Large companies should not both be in both transmission and
| content. It's a conflict of interest. Remember the "zero rating"
| issue for cellular.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Verizon held Yahoo / AOL for about five years, they were bought
| at different times. ATT bought Time Warner a little less than
| three years ago. I think it will take longer for them to give up
| on that, but I bet they will start selling it (in parts) in three
| to four years.
|
| I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but
| they are doing a great job of tanking it.
| nerdkid93 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024376
| tmaly wrote:
| I have had yahoo email addresses since the late 90s. What is
| going to happen now?
| utopcell wrote:
| You will continue to have Yahoo email addresses for the
| foreseeable future.
| grumple wrote:
| This could be a steal IF Apollo can fix the management and
| leadership issues at both companies. There's a real opportunity
| with both companies - both have pretty high revenues to only go
| for 5B. If you can cut down on operations cost OR use the ops
| cost to create more revenue, you can turn garbage to gold. They
| have a large number of engineers at both companies - I have to
| believe that with this number of engineers, you can find ways to
| make money if you get management under control.
| acheron wrote:
| _" My name is AOL Time Warner, king of kings. Look upon my works,
| ye mighty, and despair." Nothing beside remains._
| pram wrote:
| As a reminder, it's AOL who bought Time Warner. Still blows my
| mind.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Hey, didn't you know "This next evolution of Yahoo will be the
| most thrilling yet".
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There's two dead companies in that title, and the only live one
| owns content.
|
| Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well
| / mine is the best bet.
| oblio wrote:
| Didn't you, historically, want to be the person selling
| shovels?
| lanstin wrote:
| Is that Cisco or Sun in this analogy?
| [deleted]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Depends on how close you were to the 1800s -- widespread
| steam power & hydraulic mining.
|
| Mining shovels became worthless. People who owned
| exploitable resources continued to make money. (Also,
| denim)
| deeblering4 wrote:
| It's a figure of speech. "Shovels" being the tools, e.g.
| shovels, hydraulic equipment, etc.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Point being that "shovels" change. Everyone always wants
| water or gold.
| nolok wrote:
| Hey come on that's unfair, the jokes on that one will forever
| remain in the history books
| spamalot159 wrote:
| Why would Verizon want to keep a minority stake in Yahoo? Seems
| useless to me.
| after_care wrote:
| It's called hedging your bet. Yeah, you're 95% sure yahoo is
| useless, but if that 5% happens you'll look like a complete
| idiot and be locked out.
| rvnx wrote:
| Yahoo has large and growing customers (example: DuckDuckGo)
| Black101 wrote:
| I thought that DDG was getting its data from Bing... but
| either way, Yahoo was getting its data from Microsoft.
| mrweasel wrote:
| What is DuckDuckGo buying from Yahoo? I was under the
| impression that both search and ads has supplied by
| Microsoft.
| fumar wrote:
| Who does Microsoft partner with for ad monetization?
| Verizon Media
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| But still how does that make DDG a Yahoo customer?
| utopcell wrote:
| DDG was a collection of perl scripts around Yahoo BOSS
| (Build You Own Search Service), which is now backed by
| Bing. Nowadays, DDG has vastly outgrown its original
| serving by adding their most crucial ingredient: Privacy
| FUD.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That still doesn't really answer the question of how DDG
| is a Yahoo customer. BOSS is dead, and replaced by an ad
| program, which DDG doesn't use.
| utopcell wrote:
| That's true, I was just explaining why one would think
| DDG is a Yahoo customer.
| StratusBen wrote:
| I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as
| an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone
| company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars.
|
| 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.
| berkes wrote:
| That market is quite busy, though.
|
| 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.
| the_local_host wrote:
| Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find
| information about a company, I'll type the company's name into
| Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance
| and manually type it in again to look at their stock
| performance.
|
| 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.
| schnevets wrote:
| I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a
| brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade
| to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are
| eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can
| type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the
| last decade.
| kreeben wrote:
| Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance
| killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest
| for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Conflict of interest in what sense?
| dmt0 wrote:
| You go there to look at charts? That's what Trading View is
| for.
| the_local_host wrote:
| What's "Trading View"?
| jniedrauer wrote:
| https://www.tradingview.com/
| amoorthy wrote:
| Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the
| best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a
| company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it
| for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible
| decision.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| I think the first charting software was written by one
| talented javascript guy. I think he moved on and the next
| person did not want to touch the code. Which is the story
| of many Google services.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily,
| and just kills them, even if they are popular.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Or makes them worse by "developing" them
|
| Eg: Google Chrome on Android
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I really wish there was incentive to have products be
| "done". It seems that so many products get to a great
| state and then get made worse over time because we need
| continuous growth (Evernote immediately comes to mind.
| Others seem to feel similar about 1Password) or in the
| case of Google, get shut down.
| [deleted]
| tasssko wrote:
| Yes indeed. I get Evernote but not 1Password. The issue
| with Evernote for me was it kept getting slower and they
| lost me when they changed pricing, I felt they had lost
| their way and it was really easy to change note apps. I
| prefer simpler note apps today, even Google docs or Word.
| 1Password is good, the windows app could be better and
| browser integration is a pain but it's solid.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Easily the best stock charting software. And they nuked it
| because _______?
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| I thought the reason was that it was written in Flash, and
| then browsers decided to stop supporting Flash.
| coderintherye wrote:
| Yes, it really was quite perplexing. I imagine the "reason"
| was to make it more mobile-friendly or mobile-first or
| perhaps just to standardize their properties more. However,
| as you noted, it really degraded the product. I went from a
| daily user to an almost never user.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| "mobile-friendly or mobile-first" seems to be a trend in
| quite a few companies, in the last few years. The main
| problem is, the completely ignore the desktop design,
| viewing it as an either-or proposition, for some,
| unknowable reason. While it's understandable that much
| traffic is mobile, during office hours, especially during
| work from home (which will probably - at least partially
| - be a continued trend moving forward), quite a bit of
| traffic will be from a desktop/laptop. Simply ignoring
| this market share seems to be a fools errand.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Ah but its not tech unless you're ignoring all but the
| most dominant market force
| sfifs wrote:
| It probably wasn't a path to internal promotions any more
| :-)
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| Give it a year or 2, it'll be rebooted with a messaging
| feature
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Nah,they'll try to make it tiktok for stocks.
| jldugger wrote:
| I mean, Yahoo finance has one and nobody gives them any
| shit about their abysmal policing.
| kelnos wrote:
| One thing I do remember about Google Finance was that it
| required Flash for the longest time. That made me never use
| it.
| spullara wrote:
| Yahoo Finance is and always has been the best finance site.
| Mostly because they license all the additional data you
| really need to investigate a company and Google was never
| into that sort of thing.
| basch wrote:
| I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo
| Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook
| chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while
| browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any
| of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to
| get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening
| news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo
| Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites.
|
| 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.
| basch wrote:
| AIM was killed as well.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their
| last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it
| in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so
| I don't think it's particularly important (to them).
|
| Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better
| and for free now? News aggregation?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg
| Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level
| data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.
| dgfitz wrote:
| That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know
| the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large
| portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS
| space I think they would do even better.
| exogeny wrote:
| They did. Yahoo!'s DFS product is a dismal failure.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance
| and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration
| with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people"
| use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user
| growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for
| interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of
| standalone apps on some core topics.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire
| them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock
| acquisition.
|
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto,
| they just think it's a bad investment.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I doubt that you can make that as a blanket statement,
| either. There are probably plenty of conservative
| investors who do include some cryptos as part of a well-
| balanced asset allocation. It is, after all, starting to
| make plenty of inroads into the mainstream financial
| industry.
|
| What you _don 't_ see much of is conservative investors
| who are super hot on crypto. Not _necessarily_ because of
| anything about crypto, per se, so much as because part of
| being a conservative investor is that you don 't really
| get super hot on anything.
| px43 wrote:
| > Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand
| crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
|
| That statement is demonstrably false. There are two
| reasons to not be invested in cryptocurrencies at this
| point in history. You are either ignorant of the
| technology (which is fine, lots of more important
| knowledge out there), or it doesn't fit your current risk
| profile.
|
| There is not a knowledgeable person on the planet who
| would say that _any_ investment in _any_ cryptocurrency
| is bad for _all_ investors.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I would say 95% of investors don't understand crypto,
| whether they have high or low risk tolerance. But high
| risk tolerance investors are more likely to invest in
| something that has momentum without understanding the
| fundamentals. Betting with the momentum is often a good
| strategy.
| totalZero wrote:
| Change that to "95% of crypto investors don't understand
| crypto" and you've got it.
|
| Betting with the momentum works unless (A) you're a
| latecomer to a ponzi scheme, or (B) there's a reversion
| that catalyzes longstanding doubt about an asset that has
| enjoyed a bull run. Both of these cases may well be
| applicable to a large portion of the overall crypto
| marketplace.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Tell that to investors in Fitbit or Palantir (for
| example) before they sold off after having good
| "momentum". Crypto investors don't even understand
| crypto, but that doesn't mean anything, because you can
| be left holding a long term bag whether you understand
| the underlying asset or not.
| mssundaram wrote:
| Certainly not all of them. Edit - do you not consider
| Warren Buffet a conservative investor?
| nappy-doo wrote:
| Or your definition of conservative is different from
| OP's.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Do you think Warren Buffett doesn't understand crypto
| from the standpoint of finance?
| mssundaram wrote:
| I think he does and I think he's found a way to make
| money in crypto, even though he previously stated he
| thinks it will end badly
| px43 wrote:
| Warren Buffett has, on several occasions, stated that he
| does not understand cryptocurrencies.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It doesn't seem like he's invested in any crypto
| directly. He has investments in some fintech, but as far
| as I can tell those aren't in any companies where crypto
| is the main component of their business plan. It's also
| important to distinguish between his opinions on the
| potential of distribute ledger technology vs. crypto
| currencies themselves. You can have the first without the
| second.
|
| There are also levels of conservatism: Buffet still takes
| risks. In any given year, there's a possibility that he
| loses money, even if he's amazing in the long term. This
| is very far from the extreme end of conservative
| investing where, for example, someone 2-3 years away from
| retirement shifts all of their investments into a low-
| yield guaranteed return investment to ensure that a
| temporary downturn in the economy doesn't wreck their
| ability to retire.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs,
| market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to
| themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article
| written by Vitalik Buterin.
| StratusBen wrote:
| I love this idea. Thanks for sharing!
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| I use fin.yahoo quite a bit and if this were to occur I
| would quit using it full stop.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I am not sure Yahoo finance is the right place for this
| kind of integration. If they were to integrate buy/sell and
| portfolio it would be more of a plaid style where you can
| connect your existing broker. You would lose a bunch of
| users who don't want to switch to coinbase. This is why i
| was thinking a media company would make sense for the media
| asset. It should be something more neutral.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| As an liberal investor, all crypto is a pump and dump
| scheme pushing magic internet money. But we've all seen
| this debate before.
| px43 wrote:
| 1. What's so bad about magic internet money?
|
| 2. What sectors are you invested in that are somehow
| immune to hype cycles?
| naikrovek wrote:
| if anyone pushes you on blockchain-anything or
| cryptocurrency, deliver unto them a kick to the groin, or
| a punch to the face, then run away. for you have been
| targeted by thieves.
| spullara wrote:
| Yahoo Finance already tracks the cryptocurrencies. Has for
| ages. You can also integrate in exchanges to buy stocks,
| wouldn't be hard to add crypto to that. BTW, you can't buy
| DOGE-USD on Coinbase. Here it is in my wife's portfolio:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/MZlE51m.png
| jensvdh wrote:
| "Portfolio", holding DOGE is about the same as holding
| lottery tickets.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| >"magic Internet money"
|
| >DOGE
|
| Not really helping your case here
| slg wrote:
| >Yahoo sports apps
|
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| I looked this up. The top 2 are DraftKings and FanDuel.
| They have 90% marketshare. Yahoo is tied for 3rd.
| slg wrote:
| I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and
| not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do
| not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports
| industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market
| share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has
| done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in
| which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I
| threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
| StLCylone wrote:
| Source? Just want to read about it myself.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| However when doing that Twitter won't be "neutral" regarding
| news sources. That might reduce interest of other media to
| use them ...
| 0xy wrote:
| Twitter already isn't neutral, considering the "trending"
| feed is editorialized and certain trends are suppressed and
| others boosted.
|
| Twitter is a publisher. They have their fingers on the
| scale in both directions in multiple places.
| menzoic wrote:
| I thought trending feed was based on metrics
| csunbird wrote:
| Probably, yes. Also, it is very likely that any
| posts/trends that are not "desirable" are prevented
| manually from entering the trending feed as well.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Hence the finger on the scales. It would be naive to
| think Twitter doesn't have shills that troll here to
| downvote anti-twitter posts such as the one above.
|
| edit: lol case in point. I once tried twitter advertising
| and it was the worst ad spend ever.
| zaidf wrote:
| _I 'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out
| as an independent company_
|
| I'm sure Apollo Management can't wait to do this.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts
| licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their
| paid products - that could have been an amazing business for
| that division.
|
| 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.
| u678u wrote:
| There that horrible feeling when sometimes you search for a
| stock on Yahoo finance and it sends you out into the regular
| Yahoo search. WTF.
| ncmncm wrote:
| In other news: somebody thought they were worth a positive
| number.
| llacb47 wrote:
| Apollo will bleed them dry.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Yahoo employee here... AMA
| mrweasel wrote:
| Is Yahoo actually turning a profit, if so which service
| contribute the most?
|
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| Comscore ranks Verizon's properties (basically Yahoo/AOL) as
| the #2 site on the internet as well.
|
| https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I've definitely noticed Verizon being more willing to deprecate
| old services in Yahoo/AOL/Oath over the last few years. Do you
| expect this to speed up (i.e. leadership was being
| conservative) or slow down (they were chopping too much/all the
| chopping should, in theory, be done)?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| If it's not related to 5G, I would expect it to be.. less of
| a focus
| astrange wrote:
| What does it mean for something to be related to 5G?
| Actually related, or part of the "5G AI cloud" marketing
| buzzwords that don't seem to mean anything?
| [deleted]
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| Will Yahoo answers be coming back under the new ownership?
| (semi-serious question)
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Doubt it
| jason2323 wrote:
| How do you feel about this whole thing?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I'm not going to stick around
| Avalaxy wrote:
| What does Yahoo do nowadays?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Lots of stuff.. Finance is huge, Mail, Sports, Techcrunch,
| Engadget... Plus the Edgecast CDN and video platform service
| (VDMS). Was honestly hoping Verizon would keep those so I
| wasn't lumped into the Apollo sale.
| basch wrote:
| That was the most surprising part of this for me.
| Edgecast/VDMS would make more sense elsewhere than Apollo,
| like at .. Verizon, or Google.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Is Yahoo hiring? How's the pay? I think it'd be kind of fun to
| work for a zombie Web 1.0 giant in a weird sociological way. My
| first email address was @yahoo.com -- thank you for
| losing/forcibly deleting all my embarrassing teenage missives.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| They are hiring (though I suspect this will make recruiting
| harder), pay is good. Not FAANG good, but Bay area good.
| astrange wrote:
| Even in FAANG the AAs pay less (depending on career level.)
| moron4hire wrote:
| I'll buy Yahoo. I got <checks wallet> $48.67. But when I buy it,
| I want to be CEO. Don't worry, you only need to pay me half of
| what you paid the previous CEO. I promise I will only devalue the
| company by half as much as any other selection for CEO you
| already have. Think of it! That's 4x the value!
| perardi wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _..."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?)_
| itsbits wrote:
| AOL has adtech advertisers setup with some large customer base
| probably 3rd or 4th to Google/Facebook. It also owns publishers
| like HuffPost, TechCrunch etc.
| perardi wrote:
| Well when your large customer base leads you to a $5 billion
| writedown and a public confession that Google and Facebook
| are eating your lunch...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon.
| ..
|
| ...color me skeptical that there's a bright future there.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Writing off $5B means a ton of money for Verizon. Right
| there we can see they already didn't actually lose half of
| their investment spend.
|
| Most people's lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had
| to go with a different ads biz model to not directly
| compete with the big two.
|
| It doesn't stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the
| 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I'm
| hedging 6th in case there's some one else between Microsoft
| and Amazon.
| itsbits wrote:
| They had good customer base initially. AOL has done so many
| acquisitions for like Adaptv(video advertising platform),
| Millenial Media(mobile advertising) etc which were pretty
| successful. Later ofcourse Yahoo. Failure started coz they
| platform integration plan didn't work as expected. Lot of
| talent from the acquisitions left. They still use lot of
| old tech setup for advertising, web platforms. In summary,
| they failed in making a single platform from acquisitions
| they had.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I think Verizon Media is 5th after the big two, Amazon,
| Microsoft. Unless LinkedIn is separate from Microsoft.
| Macha wrote:
| Amazon is smaller than Verizon Media in this space.
| Microsoft and Verizon Media are not independent - Microsoft
| handles Verizon's search ads, Verizon handles ads on other
| Microsoft properties: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-
| us/solutions/ad-products/...
|
| That said, single market players like TheTradeDesk or Xandr
| are larger in their own markets than verizon media, but
| probably not compared to the combined publisher and
| advertiser business: https://www.atlantic.net/vps-
| hosting/top-10-dsp-providers/
| pridkett wrote:
| HuffPost was sold to Business Insider in 2020.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/buzzfeed-to-acquire-
| huffpost_...
| itsbits wrote:
| Aah..my bad..I missed that..but that was vision(advertising
| + publishing) of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong..he was almost
| successful until Verizon acquisition and later Yahoo
| merger.
| gnicholas wrote:
| That reminds me of the movie Frequency, in which the characters
| can use a ham radio to talk across time. A person from the
| future gives a cryptic hint to the person in the past by
| telling him to pay attention to "yahoo". In the ending scene of
| the movie, the younger man's fancy car bears a license plate
| with that name.
|
| 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_(2000_film)
| skinnymuch wrote:
| They didn't lose that much money. The companies were
| profitable. They sold assets. If they lost money. It would be
| maybe $1B at most. I doubt that happened though. The tax write
| offs gave back a lot of money too.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I don't get how Apollo thinks they can make a profit from these
| zombie companies.
|
| How long has it been since an acquisition of either one of
| those companies made the acquirer any money? More than a
| decade?
| utopcell wrote:
| Doubtful that they lost money. The company has probably
| returned some profit over all these years. They got a huge tax
| benefit from the 2018 write-off, $1BN from selling the Yahoo
| buildings to Google, and now $5BN from selling 90% of it.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I have my main mail domain linked to a yahoo mail address since
| 1997. If it goes down .. I'm seriously f**d.
| irrational wrote:
| Wait, AOL is still around? What do they do these days? Does
| anyone here work for AOL?
| Macha wrote:
| Adtech is the most active market, that's pretty merged with
| Yahoo's businesses these days. A lot of stuff that wasn't
| actively branded AOL was run by AOL too, like huffpost,
| techcrunch, engadget, etc. though Verizon has sold a decent
| amount of that off prior to now. Also mail/aol.com still has
| users among an older cohort.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| Do not work for AOL but know that their email service is still
| heavily used. I have a family member who pays a monthly fee for
| basic email and refuses to give it up.
| nolok wrote:
| > Verizon [...] combined [Yahoo] with AOL under the umbrella
| Oath.
|
| Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making
| a typo.
| fumar wrote:
| I can't find information on how Apollo Group runs it's PE
| portfolio. I assume they will eliminate costs and merge
| businesses where it makes sense. The press release mentions brick
| and mortar opportunities but Apollo doesn't own major brands
| outside of Sprouts and GNC. It sounds like another miss for Yahoo
| again.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I believe Apollo has a big stake in several casinos. Yahoo's
| sports/fantasy data is probably their most valuable & viable
| site. The regulatory environment surrounding online gambling,
| sports gambling, and daily fantasy gambling in particular has
| been changing rapidly and, despite being well situated from a
| technology standpoint, Yahoo hasn't made much of an effort to
| capitalize on it. I'm guessing Apollo plans to find a way for
| the Yahoo sports data to work with their casinos to get on the
| legalized gambling gravy train.
| yalogin wrote:
| This was never in doubt. Everyone knew this was going to happen.
| Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can
| salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it? I
| have a feeling this is some kind of tax avoidance scheme. Knowing
| nothing about taxes and accounting I will let knowledgeable
| people correct me.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Maybe all Verizon wanted were the names of the people who were
| signed up with Yahoo so they could glean all their ones and
| zeros as well as some cash selling them phone plans?
| evanelias wrote:
| > Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can
| salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it?
|
| 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.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| > Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can
| salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it?
|
| 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
| yalogin wrote:
| Give me an instance this kind of salvaging happened in tech.
| Tech and non tech differ a lot in this case, one cannot use
| the generic business pattern there. People run of tissues and
| every time they run out, they seize being a customer and are
| new customers in the market looking for a brand. That is when
| discounts, shiny packaging etc help. Tech is not that way.
| There is an enormous entrenchment with things like email and
| even news readers. Particularly in online services, People
| don't switch, that is the reason why the biggest sites are so
| loathe to changing the smallest things on their pages. In the
| same vein, companies that go out of favor don't ever come
| back. I am trying to think of examples of any that might have
| but am unable to. There are tons of brands that are either
| sold off as acquihires or just left for dead and ignored
| though.
| debacle wrote:
| With AOL and Yahoo and all the pieces, there was definitely a
| value play here.
|
| Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute
| that.
| mfer wrote:
| Yahoo is still in wide use by people and AOL owns a number of
| properties and has a decent ad business. It may be that these
| companies were trying to extract value from them. This happens
| a decent amount these days. It's less about salvaging a brand.
| treesknees wrote:
| In the past few years I've come across several businesses
| (landscaping, home repairs, etc.) that have been
| communicating with me using Yahoo email addresses. Many
| people forget that Yahoo mail was the "Gmail" of its time,
| and many of those users are still around, especially non-tech
| oriented users and businesses who have no incentive to switch
| to anything else.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I still use Yahoo Finance. Not extensively, but I haven't
| found a site I like better for getting random stock quotes &
| sifting through lightweight financial information.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| Yeah same. They have an API that is fairly consistent for
| stock stuff. If you're gonna do deep diligence there are
| better tools but for sniffing around, yeah they're good.
| rootbear wrote:
| I still have a verizon.net email address (managed by AOL)
| that I use exclusively for sites that are likely to spam me.
| The torrent of political email I got at that address before
| the last election was amazing to behold.
| utopcell wrote:
| Ahh.. retrospect prophets, the scarcest HN resource.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| I've been waiting for Yahoo to finally die for a decade now.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I haven't heard of anyone using yahoo for anything except to
| check ticker prices in years.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My "junk" e-mail address is a yahoo address.
|
| I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20
| years of random e-mails in there.
| infinityplus1 wrote:
| Just import all emails from Yahoo to Gmail/Outlook. They
| provide importers.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Ah, that's actually a significant loss. It's quite useful
| to be able to search for when you signed up for X or Y
| years ago.
|
| Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's
| really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at
| the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now
| that way.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yeah recently I had to replace the HID bulbs in my
| motorcycle. The Amazon ones were junk so I wanted the
| same ones I originally bought 11 years ago. Sure enough
| there was the email from 2010 and the company still had
| the same bulbs.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| A lot of people use it for fantasy sports because... I'm not
| sure why but they do. Also its impossible to set up email
| forwarding with them so I have a very old email address I
| keep active.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Back when I was working with a bunch of fantasy football
| fanatics, they considered Yahoo the second-best site for
| doing so. ESPN's site was considered better, but those
| running leagues with less tech-inclined folks knew more
| people had Yahoo accounts already.
| infinityplus1 wrote:
| They have disabled email forwarding in free accounts.
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-mail-discontinues-
| automa...
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. And if you delete your account someone else can sign
| up for that account name and start getting your email.
| bearcobra wrote:
| I wonder how things would have gone had Microsoft been successful
| in its acquisition of Yahoo. The value of the Altaba assets don't
| make the offered price seem quite so crazy in retrospect.
| robomartin wrote:
| Every time I hear news about Yahoo I think about Rocketmail [0].
|
| I've had email addresses on Rocketmail for a very long time. I
| always worry they will shutter this historically significant
| domain & email service.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMail
| lbsnake7 wrote:
| Can someone help me understand this from an investment
| perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in
| the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a
| fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup
| their investment through dividends and such over the last 25
| years to justify that market cap?
|
| Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+
| billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?
| christophilus wrote:
| Holding those names was an investment failure, as was holding
| the majority of tech names at that point in history. Trading
| those names, on the other hand could be lucrative. A friend of
| mine paid cash for his college education and his car by playing
| Hand, the maker of palm pilots.
| reiichiroh wrote:
| Handspring?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Presumably.
|
| I miss my Visor, tbh.
| u678u wrote:
| If people stop using Facebook products yes the investors will
| lose 900,000,000,000 dollars.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy, putting it
| lightly.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jldugger wrote:
| > The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy
|
| Or perhaps a medieval wheel of fortune.
|
| [1]: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/539503/view/the-
| wheel-of-...
| bredren wrote:
| For highly valued tech stocks I'd add that there is some
| presumption that these companies will acquire or build their
| way into major new sources of revenue that throw off vast
| profits.
|
| 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.
| blihp wrote:
| In other words, the greater fool theory.
| berkes wrote:
| Not really. The crucial piece is the future profit.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| As many nerds as there are who grew up on AOL, I'm surprised they
| haven't yet gotten together GameStop-style and bought AOL for
| themselves, to put into a nice retirement home. :)
| Macha wrote:
| If you mean AOL the closed network, think there's 10 years
| between the centers of those cohorts.
|
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| They definitely squeezed a better deal than with the sale of
| Tumblr last year (which went for 3 mere millions)
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| At that price I'm surprised some crypto millionaire/billionaire
| or hell at this point an NFT artist didn't just buy it as a
| joke, tokenize it and flip it for profit.
|
| 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.
| daveevad wrote:
| Maybe Apollo plans on meme-stonking YHOO?
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| I do get the feeling of an underlying crypto play marketed
| on the old brands AOL/Yahoo.
|
| I didn't even think about something as simple meme stonk.
| It may sound like sarcasm and a joke, but look at the meme
| stonks or Doge ($11B+ market cap)...sure the kids on tik
| tok might not know what yahoo or aol are/were but that
| actually makes them fresh to the new generation, mixed in
| with a little nostalgia from those slightly older that
| would love to jump on the next rocket going to the
| moon...it's seriously just 1 Elon tweet from a doubling in
| value.
| soco wrote:
| I don't know what "meme stonking" means, can you please
| direct me a bit as I don't get anything meaningful from
| Google?
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| See Reddit Wall Street Bets (WSB) for a sample of the
| culture, I think the most popular example would be the
| entire Game Stop debacle.
|
| Lots of opinions on the matter but essentially, Wall
| Street players shorted the stock, "Main Street" day
| traders got wind of the play and pumped the stock (in one
| instance it would have resulted in loses in the billions
| of a single fund and probably bankrupted them), either
| that fund or a major investor of that fund is an investor
| in Robinhood which is an app used by a significant number
| of the main street option traders pumping game stop
| stock, Robinhood allegedly on the order of said
| investors/fund froze certain orders on game stop stock
| (and a few other meme stocks) for about 24-48 hours which
| sank the price of the stock and allowing Wall Street to
| minimize their losses and close their positions. Of
| course Robinhood has done what it could on their end to
| distance themself from the investor/fund and on more than
| one occasion made official statements why they stopped
| orders on the cherry picked stocks, basically falling on
| their own sword and more or less saying they were under
| funded and over leveraged.
|
| You can sort of trace the recent crypto market pump to
| this event, as a result of Main Street throwing in the
| towel (right or wrong) because the collective acceptance
| market is rigged.
| robjan wrote:
| It's basically doing what happened to AMC and GameStop a
| couple of months ago
| evanelias wrote:
| I suspect the true total cost was a fair bit higher due to a
| hosting arrangement. I'd imagine Tumblr remained on Yahoo bare
| metal servers for quite some time after the sale. If so,
| Automattic would have had to pay a significant monthly fee for
| this, given Tumblr's large infrastructure footprint.
|
| 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
| just_observing wrote:
| > I suspect the true total cost was a fair bit higher due to
| a hosting arrangement.
|
| 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.
| evanelias wrote:
| Huh, OK. So you're saying the $3m price included the many
| months of continued hosting and bandwidth in Yahoo's
| datacenter? Quite a bad deal for Verizon if so, especially
| accounting for routine hardware maintenance.
| ksec wrote:
| A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.
|
| 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. )
| 310260 wrote:
| mmWave is a tool to cope with network capacity concerns far
| into the future. It's in its infancy right now but the ability
| to provide multiple gigabits over the air in certain high-
| traffic locations can help greatly. We're running out of
| midband spectrum that can provide good indoor/outdoor coverage
| and so it's best to look to much higher frequencies that don't
| have any major incumbent users to satisfy those capacity needs.
| avianlyric wrote:
| mmWave doesn't penetrate glass or brick making it pretty
| useless as a wireline replacement. Unless you want to go
| through the trouble of mounting an antenna outside, assuming of
| course that you access to wall with direct line of sight to a
| 5G tower.
| bitwize wrote:
| For the same reason Sprint went all in on WiMAX "4G" about ten
| years back: they think it gives them a value-add.
| codezero wrote:
| FWIW I'm bummed it didn't work out. I had a WiMax phone and
| even with the spotty coverage, back then (~2012?) my speeds
| were as good as my current broadband speeds (>200 Mbps) which
| was phenomenal for sprint. I even considered getting a
| dedicated WiMax internet provider at the time. Amazing how
| fast that came and went!
| bitwize wrote:
| I had one too and the enormous drawbacks of WiMAX became
| apparent: go deep enough into a building and the signal
| gets spotty fast. WiMAX may work well for fast wireless
| internet to thin-walled homes, but it just doesn't work as
| well as a mobile technology.
| codezero wrote:
| Makes sense. I only went into buildings with wifi so that
| may be why it always felt perfect for me.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I had WiMax from Clearwire. It was really epic. The dongle
| on my laptop delivered speeds that weren't even available
| wired at the time. I used it in Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago,
| Newark, and a few other cities, and coverage wasn't bad at
| all.
|
| The only difficulty was that it had a hard time penetrating
| buildings. In my apartments, I could get 1-2 Mbps anywhere.
| But if I moved the modem into a window it was more like
| 25-75 Mbps.
|
| I hope that some day 5G will be as good as WiMax was.
| ksec wrote:
| The tech wasn't that bad. I mean WiMax is something like 80%
| if not 90% of what is TD-LTE today. Which Sprint is still
| using right now.
|
| 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?
| wmf wrote:
| Each G is supposed to be 10x faster and it needs to be at least
| 2x for customers to care and sub-6 just can't deliver that.
| SigmundA wrote:
| 5G allows for mmWave but does not require it. I have 5G in my
| area for Verizon but its mostly low band normal 4G frequencies.
| I have seen mmWave once at the fair grounds and it was nice
| hitting 1200MBps with tons of people streaming videos etc.
| otherwise it seems similar to 4G on low band.
|
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| >mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground
|
| 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 )
| dweekly wrote:
| The reason why they are heavily marketing their mmWave 5G is
| because they are charging an additional $10/mo/line for access
| and implying (falsely) that most folks with a modern phone will
| experience a much faster and lower latency connection at most
| times. In truth, consumers will only be able to connect to the
| mmWave network on a handful of outdoor street corners in a few
| metros - the frequency band (60GHz) does not effectively
| penetrate walls so you're not going to get it indoors.
|
| "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.
| dboreham wrote:
| I got the impression the primary use case for 60GHz was large
| sports stadia.
| dweekly wrote:
| Yes - dense environments with good line-of-sight should
| work well for 60GHz (train stations, airports, concerts).
| Enormous channel capacity for a short, straight hop.
| adrr wrote:
| They have deployed a bunch of mm towers in the metros. LA
| went from a few blocks to having widespread coverage since
| last summer. Still not worth the extra $10 a month and the
| reduction on battery life. I have my 5G disabled. 5G ultra
| wide is only useful for home internet as a replacement for
| cable based internet.
| [deleted]
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| As with many things, 5g will be worth it once they stop
| marketing it.
| fireattack wrote:
| >A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the
| article.
|
| 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.
| roymurdock wrote:
| A useful 5G network is much broader than what VZ currently has
| set up in the mmWave range (high-band, >6GHz, high-speed, low
| propagation)
|
| 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
| jugg1es wrote:
| As someone who came of age during the 90s, I am amazed at how
| little this story matters in terms of real-world impact now.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This was already becoming true by 2005. Dialup was in decline,
| and Google was beating Yahoo.
| floxy wrote:
| I had to look up whatever became of CompuServe and Prodigy.
| Interestingly enough, it looks like Prodigy was acquired by
| Yahoo in 2001 and CompuServe was acquired by AOL.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
| airstrike wrote:
| My first reaction is that this is really good for everyone.
|
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Do you really believe Apollo won't gut up Yahoo and AOL or some
| other situation where any leftover spirit of the entities isn't
| mostly gone? This is better than remaining with Verizon since
| they don't want to deal with such small stuff. Here's hoping
| things end up better for assets.
| ipaddr wrote:
| No othey are going to leverage traffic into gambling assets.
| They don't want to gut the product. They will invest.
| airstrike wrote:
| Define "gut up". Why would Apollo want to destroy the asset
| they just bought?
| az_reth wrote:
| The same reason a scrapyard buys broken cars?
| airstrike wrote:
| Or maybe Apollo bought this in the same way some people
| buy fixer-uppers and flip them?
|
| Analogies are great for illustration, but not for
| arguments. They don't really prove anything.
| sparcpile wrote:
| Venture Capital firms love to use throw debt at an asset so
| that they can have a cash windfall. The result is that the
| assets can never pay off the debt and end up declaring
| bankruptcy. See K-Mart, Sears, Toys R' Us, and anything
| that a vulture capitalist touches.
| airstrike wrote:
| Your view of how LBOs work is really misinformed. You
| picked 3 famous PE deals that failed, but those are
| exceptions.
|
| Apollo alone has done 150 private equity transactions,
| the vast majority of which have been tremendously
| successful otherwise investors would not be giving them
| more money to continue to invest.
| _jal wrote:
| A lot of PE follows a well-understood playbook. Buy a
| player in a settled industry, cut costs (== reduce
| maintenance, make the workforce cost less, etc.) and milk
| it for as long as possible.
|
| That tends to work for investors; customers and
| employees, well.
|
| The Artist Formerly Known as SolarWinds is PE owned.
| airstrike wrote:
| They don't milk it for as long as possible. In fact, they
| exit the investment in 3-5 years. Anything longer and
| their IRR dwindles fast.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Successful from the point of the PE firm is not the same
| as successful from the point of view of the acquired
| company
| airstrike wrote:
| It is if the alternative is to be woefully out-competed.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Venture Capital firms are early stage private investors.
| They don't do LBOs with dying companies, since that would
| naturally be a late stage investment. You're probably
| thinking of private equity.
| sayhar wrote:
| Yes, but you're thinking of private equity.
| ppetty wrote:
| I used to work at Aol, and it doesn't surprise me that some
| significant number of people still use dial up. Not because
| they're "trapped" but because that's the only choice in some
| parts of the country. According to Pew, 3% of us are on dialup &
| more than twice that use no ISP (maybe that 7% just uses their
| mobile access?).
|
| 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.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I think it's incorrect to just associate AOL with dialup. AOL
| still exists as a web "portal" and more importantly as an email
| service.
|
| 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.
| sida wrote:
| Your 3% number is from 2013 though
| reaperducer wrote:
| I looked up the Census numbers last year, and for my county
| it's something like 17% of people have no internet access -at
| all-. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on a cell phone. And
| this isn't exactly the boonies. It's a county with over a
| million people in it.
|
| Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I wonder what Apollo's due diligence team found on Yahoo Answers
| that necessitated shutting it down in order to announce the deal.
| evanelias wrote:
| I doubt it was anything specific. The simple combination of
| "user-generated content platform" and "hadn't received any
| staffing support for many years" means it's a huge potential
| liability for abuse claims, copyright infringement, etc.
| interestica wrote:
| What part of this article or headline (or this sale in general)
| suggests "turning focus to its 5G network"?
| Macha wrote:
| Verizon's marketing has been "5G, 5G, 5G". Verizon Media was
| the one part that was not so obviously linked to 5G. Their
| other two segments, residential and business, could clearly
| sell 5G to customers. So by ditching their non-ISP division,
| it's a focus on their ISP business, which is gungho on 5G.
| [deleted]
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and
| before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left;
| rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was
| undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her
| vision.
|
| 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.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Similar things have happened elsewhere in the media world. I've
| seen some of them first-hand within the org. It was hard to
| watch a 100-year old magazine of note continuously stretched to
| its possible thinnest by the parent company because the returns
| were not what they blindly promised and seemingly wanted to
| reduce the price of the properties to make a sale cheaper.
| Thankfully in that case the company who purchased the
| properties is actively working to bring them back to their
| former selves.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win
|
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I went to HuffPo just now. It appears to be same sort of stuff
| from years ago. HuffPo never had the rep of a shining beacon of
| journalism or even integrity.
|
| Didn it ever make a profit?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| No, it was bleeding money for a long time. They had to
| essentially pay Buzzfeed to take it off their hands.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Very similar to the Tumblr situation.
| crmd wrote:
| I hope this is the beginning of the end of phone companies
| expanding into being mass media companies.
| 271828182846 wrote:
| Repacked suprime mortgages all over again ...
| oblio wrote:
| Have you looked at AOL and Yahoo financials before saying that?
| I think both are profitable.
| throwaway088 wrote:
| Before people go all ballistic, please remember that yahoo and
| AOL make $700 million from Mail and a billion dollars from
| search. AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email
| accounts(for older people though). So the sale price is
| approximately two years of revenue. Apollo is getting it cheap!
| perardi wrote:
| _"AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts"_
|
| 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.
| runako wrote:
| > https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new
|
| "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.
| perardi wrote:
| Ah, and here, a source!
|
| 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.
| throwaway088 wrote:
| You have to read financial reports of aol if you can get hold
| of it. AOL doesn't want this info to be too widely known.
| Then all the old people will realize they are paying $25 per
| month for something that they can get for free!
| nr2x wrote:
| Or Verizon already knows tracking-based ads are not long for
| this world and got out before the adtech crash.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Apollo is getting it cheap!
|
| And Apollo will gut these entities for every dollar that they
| can.
| gscott wrote:
| That would be the best thing maybe some of them will have
| longer and better lives, finally escape being trapped.
| sswaner wrote:
| Not their model. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-apollos-
| new-ceo-insurance-i...
| benpink wrote:
| Ersidjdjdejsj
| js2 wrote:
| > For Apollo, it's an opportunity to further invest in the
| digital media space -- an industry it has already put money
| behind with deals for Shutterfly, Rackspace and Cox Media.
|
| 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.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Yahoo employee. AMA
| the_snooze wrote:
| How is babby formed?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Who will be hosting verizon.net email accounts, held by
| Frontier customers?
| ciabattabread wrote:
| My parents have an old Verizon DSL account, and their email
| got moved to yahoo, but the address still has verizon.net
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| AFAIK, those are still managed by Verizon
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| They are managed by AOL now. Access is thru mail.aol.com.
| Will they return to Verizon?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| That's interesting. As far as I understood AOL mail was
| handled by Yahoo at this point.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I haven't seen any indication that Yahoo handles AOL mail
| but I don't see internal stuff.
|
| The setup page for ext access to verizon.net/AOL accounts
| has a verizon domain for SMTP & POP and an AOL domain for
| IMAP.
|
| eg: pop.verizon.net smtp.verizon.net imap.aol.com
|
| ref: https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-
| email-ap...
|
| Hopefully this indicates that control over all
| verizon.net email accounts will fully revert to Verizon.
| Well, more like a blind wish. AOL mail management has
| been a little onerous - like mandating quarterly login to
| the webmail portal, else get locked out of POP access.
| Macha wrote:
| My understanding is similar to oaththrowaway, these are
| all internally handled by the same backend systems.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is the data from Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups, and GeoCities
| really deleted or is there a chance that they could be restored
| somehow?
| basch wrote:
| You dont think its the other way around? "We dont want the
| liability of certain trash, please dispose of it ahead of the
| sale."
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I don't have any insight into that. Would bet the world never
| sees it again though
| fdeage wrote:
| Do you think that Yahoo deserves its fate?
| xn--7pr67wky3 wrote:
| Under their Oath umbrella, Verizon operates domains (such as
| wow.com, love.com, etc.) that customers still use for email, do
| you think they'll sell these assets off?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| If it's under the Oath umbrella, it was included in the sale.
| ridaj wrote:
| What have been the great successes of recent years, as seen
| internally at Yahoo?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Getting rid of Tumblr and HuffPo probably
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Ow. That's harsh.
| ksec wrote:
| What are the modern tech Stack behind Yahoo?
|
| Still have any FreeBSD running?
|
| Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
|
| [1] https://vespa.ai
| toast0 wrote:
| I worked at Yahoo Travel until 2011. When I left, transition
| to Linux was in full swing. If there's any FreeBSD left, the
| host count has got to be tiny by now. Running two OSes is a
| pain, and Linux has bigger mindshare, so there you go.
|
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| > What are the modern tech Stack behind Yahoo?
|
| 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.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I don't have any insight into Yahoo search. Not sure about
| FreeBSD. My org is all on AWS + Azure
| givinguflac wrote:
| Will yahoo mobile phone service continue or be absorbed into
| visible?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Good question. I mean the only difference is the purple phone
| right?
| [deleted]
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and
| before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left;
| rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was
| undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her
| vision.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is
| sold.
| kolbe wrote:
| Is this the final blow for Yahoo!'s finance API?
| airstrike wrote:
| Why would it be final? It seems to be quite successful, and any
| new owner would want to keep it that way
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Acquisitions often result in downsizing, aka "rightsizing"
| due to newfound efficiencies and synergies.
| airstrike wrote:
| Right, and they presumably do that to create value rather
| than destroy. How is that going to hurt Yahoo Finance
| again?
| kolbe wrote:
| There is zero upside to the free public API as far as I
| can tell. Granted it's low cost to keep it up, but it's
| not generating any revenue.
| airstrike wrote:
| It is generating revenue if it attracts customers to the
| paid tier.
| [deleted]
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