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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
If you won big on a gold/oil/internet strike you were much, much better off buying as many shovels you could at any price and mining for all you were worth.
Selling shovels is a reliable, lower risk business for a while. But Sun/SGI/Cray/Dell/Nortel/etc show the risks that come with relying on shovel income.
…“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?)
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.
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.
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.
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/
Ah interesting. Yeah, I’m not sure how a full proper ranking or comparison for digital ad market would be done. There’s lot of ad networks including the DSP list. Ad spend perhaps? Most of the major sites or apps that are only for their own property don’t include outside ads. I’m thinking LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, Reddit, Yelp.
I’m not certain on all of this though. Chumbox ads (Taboola, etc) have proliferated to a whole range of sites including top ones by now too.
But then IAC, Verizon Media’s biggest properties, would be a mix of different things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apollo can be thought of as garbage disposal for tech companies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
> 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.
"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...
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.
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.
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)?
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?
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.
Comscore’s data collection relies on users installing their shady monitoring software - I imagine users who install such software are significantly more likely to have a yahoo email account. Same issue with Alexa ranks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
“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.
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!
“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.”
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.
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.
$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" ?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
365 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadShortly 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.
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.
Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.
Mining shovels became worthless. People who owned exploitable resources continued to make money. (Also, denim)
If you won big on a gold/oil/internet strike you were much, much better off buying as many shovels you could at any price and mining for all you were worth.
Selling shovels is a reliable, lower risk business for a while. But Sun/SGI/Cray/Dell/Nortel/etc show the risks that come with relying on shovel income.
…“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?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/12/verizon...
…color me skeptical that there’s a bright future there.
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.
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/
But then IAC, Verizon Media’s biggest properties, would be a mix of different things.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/buzzfeed-to-acquire-huffpost_...
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)
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.
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.
Verizon may just not have been the right company to execute that.
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
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.
I'm very skeptical about that claim.
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.
https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings
I'd actually be a little sad to see it go, I have almost 20 years of random e-mails in there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not Marco, if that's what you're asking? I post here with my full real name and have links in my HN profile...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-website...
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.
Why is it important for you to call Yahoo "dead" ?
Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.
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.
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.