
Verizon signals its Yahoo and AOL divisions are almost worthless - krn
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/verizon-signals-its-yahoo-aol-divisions-are-almost-worthless-n946846
======
iClaudiusX
The bigger story is they're getting rid of 44,000 employees (nearly a third of
their workforce), with the first 10,000 taking voluntary buyouts right now.
That's after a $4.5 Billion tax cut. Rather than invest in those engineers,
they're outsourcing to offshore IT.

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/12/veriz...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/12/verizon-cuts-10000-jobs-and-admits-its-yahooaol-division-
is-a-failure/)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizons-severance-offer-
goes-t...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizons-severance-offer-goes-to-
about-44-000-employees-1538587179?mod=article_inline)

~~~
lsc
periodic reminder: if your employer (especially your private sector, non-union
employer) offers you a buyout? Jump on it.

After the first round of layoffs, there's a lot more stress, and the
severance, almost without exception is a lot less generous for the second
round of layoffs. Take the package; find a new job.

~~~
wallacoloo
> Verizon said it would also cut 10,400 jobs through voluntary buyouts — a 6.8
> percent reduction in its workforce that will cost the company as much as
> $2.1 billion in severance charges.

Surely this doesn’t mean that each employee who leaves gets to pocket an
average of $200,000, right? But where else would this money go?

~~~
1024core
They are offering a generous severance, worth _up to_ 60 weeks (of employment)
depending on the amount of time you've been there.

~~~
olyjohn
"three weeks’ pay for each year of service" from the WSJ article.

~~~
reaperducer
Maybe the rest is in healthcare.

------
moomin
Has anyone tried to use an OATH site from the EU and tried to make any actual
GDPR decisions? It's unusably bad.

Now, it may well be perfectly legal to render the site completely unusable if
you don't want the default (I'll let others argue that out) but... it's meant
my personal use of these sites has dropped to zero. I literally go "Oh, OATH,
never mind."

I might not be in the majority, but it sounds like they could use all the
visitors they can get.

~~~
jfk13
I can't imagine that's actually GDPR compliant. Since that appeared, I just
won't waste my time trying to use their sites.

~~~
yholio
It's clearly an asymmetric consent system, designed to make it harder to
whitdraw consent. These are forbidden explicitly under GDPR.

------
code4tee
When Yahoo was Yahoo the “Yahoo” bit (everything that wasn’t the Alibaba
shares) was valued as negative dollars for a bit given that the market cap of
YHOO was less than the value of the Alibaba shares. So if now it’s “virtually
worthless” that’s better than being worth negative dollars. (Trying to see the
bright side here.)

Does of course raise the question of why did Verizon pay anything for Yahoo
but those are the tough questions Verizon’s executive team will need to answer
for its shareholders.

~~~
vonmoltke
> When Yahoo was Yahoo the “Yahoo” bit (everything that wasn’t the Alibaba
> shares) was valued as negative dollars for a bit given that the market cap
> of YHOO was less than the value of the Alibaba shares.

That's not how it works.

First, when a company's price-to-book ratio (the ratio of the company's share
price to its book value per share) you can't take semi-arbitrary parts of the
company's book value that add up to its market cap and declare the rest to be
worth negative value. The situation arises because investors value the overall
package less than someone who would like to own the assets outright.

Second, static piles of money will always be discounted by the market,
particularly when they are mostly illiquid (as the Alibaba stake was). If the
Alibaba stake had been separated out into a publicly-traded company by itself
it would have traded well below its book value, because what rational investor
wants to buy into a static pile of money?

~~~
vasco
> because what rational investor wants to buy into a static pile of money

I'll happily pay you however much you let me buy of a static pile of money for
under the dollar amount of the pile, as long as the difference covers transfer
fees. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the only one either.

This to say that when you state "that's not how it works", that's your
analysis of the market, and you're free to rationalize how you think the
market arrived at a current valuation, but other people will rationalize it
differently. That's the whole reason why different investment strategies
exist.

~~~
estsauver
Stock isn't money. If you owned 50% of the shares of Google you couldn't
easily turn it into 50% of Google's market cap. You might be able to turn it
into 45%, but the price right now is the price at the margins to buy ~1 share
from someone who is willing to sell one share. If you tried to sell half, you
would find radically less people are interested at that price then you would
need to sell all of your portfolio.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
But you'd also find people would be willing to lend you actual money using
your stock as collateral. And if the stock tanks and you default on the loan,
it's often the lender that gets screwed.

The nominal interest depends entirely on their faith in you and their
estimates of future value.

There are various standard scams associated with games like this.

To keep it simple it's true that stock isn't money. But it's unbelievably easy
to turn stock into money without necessarily having to sell it, or without
being forced to modify the market rate with a giant stock dump.

~~~
harshreality
But you can't turn a large amount of stock into 100% cash through a loan,
either. Many banks will give you <<100% of the stock value in cash, but no
bank will give you close to 100% of the value[1]. You get to pay interest on
the cash loan, too, which makes it worse than a pile of cash.

The scams, as far as I can see, relate to the bank overvaluing the collateral
or its liquidity, which is rightly the bank's fault, so it's reasonable that
they bear the risk and get screwed. Unless it's a pure scam though, the lendee
gets screwed too, by losing the collateral (and a lot more of it than
necessary, if it's liquidated at short term lows).

[1] Unless the bank is playing the bubble game of collecting interest on the
loan and not caring if the loan defaults or the underlying asset drops below
the outstanding loan amount (could be either because they anticipate a
bailout, or they already got fat salaries and bonuses and don't care if bank
goes down in flames, but _most_ of that kind of fiduciary irresponsibility is
punished by regulations).

------
throwaway5752
This article seems incorrect. Oath is Yahoo + AOL.

Goodwill
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_\(accounting\)))
is the amount you paid for an acquistion, above and beyond the fair-market
book value of a company.

Just per the article, AOL was $4.4B and Yahoo was $4.5B. Now, just ignoring
any tuck in acquisitions that Oath has made as a unit (presumably goodwill
being rolled up under it), you have $9.9B in acquisition costs with $4.8B in
goodwill initially.

They are just saying they overpaid by $4.6B, and it's now worth $5.3B. If any
CPAs are out there would love to know if my interpretation is right.

~~~
deckar01
> Verizon said in the filing Tuesday that it last assessed the Oath brand's
> goodwill at $4.8 billion. Writing off $4.6 billion of that means Verizon now
> values Oath — including AOL and Yahoo subsidiaries like Yahoo.com, AOL.com,
> the Huffington Post, MSN and TechCrunch — at just $200 million on paper.

They are saying the value the brand adds to the underlying assets (goodwill)
is really 4% of what they originally paid. The brand is relatively worthless.

~~~
treis
Goodwill isn't the value of the brand. It's just an accounting term to account
for the difference in book value and purchase price. Goodwill is basically
everything valuable about a company that isn't reflected on their books.
Things like relationships with suppliers/buyers, customer base, institutional
knowledge, specialized employees, etc.

~~~
paulddraper
Why wouldn't customer base or supplier relationships be any less a part of the
legitimate market valuation?

~~~
treis
They're not. That's why purchase price and book value are often different.
Goodwill is the difference between the two in order to make the purchaser's
books make sense.

Let's say you're buying a trucking firm. Their only assets are 10 trucks worth
a total of one million and they have no liabilities. The book value of that
firm is one million. Let's say that the firm is one of the few with the
specialized knowledge required to ship radioactive waste. They make quite a
bit of money so you buy them for their market value of 10 million.

If we look at your books, it looks like you just spent 10 million for 1
million of assets. In other words, your company just lost 9 million dollars.
Obviously that doesn't make sense. The accounting way out of that is to add in
9 million dollars of goodwill. The transaction is then 10 million for 1
million worth of trucks and 9 million worth of goodwill. So now you're paying
10 million for 10 million worth of assets and don't show a loss on your books.

Say a year later due to some safety issues you lose your license to ship
radioactive waste. Now the trucking company is just a regular ole trucking
company and worth a lot less. So you write down the value of the goodwill so
your books reflect reality and use the write down to offset profits to lower
your taxes.

~~~
paulddraper
So basically every SASS company has basically zero book value?

~~~
treis
I'm not an accountant so take this with a grain of salt, but no a SAAS company
would not have a zero book value. The software powering the company is an
asset and should be a quite valuable one. A zero book value company would be
something like a consulting firm.

~~~
mbesto
IIRC, most saas companies will be bought as Stock Purchases and not Asset
Purchases, so the math becomes a little easier to do. Difference between the
two:
[https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/de...](https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/deals/asset-
purchase-vs-stock-purchase/)

PS - great explanation of goodwill!

------
edm0nd
AOL will always be priceless in my opinion. It helped shape and spawn tens of
thousands of IT people and programmers. Anyone from back in the days of AOL
2.5 or 3.0 that used 1IM punters, cchats, <M><, scrolling on internals, etc.
will know what I mean. The internet was a wild and amazing place back then.

~~~
cat199
> The internet was a wild and amazing place back then.

was aol even connected to the internet at that point?

~~~
irishcoffee
Iirc you could dial into AOL and then pop open a browser. I may have a bad
recollection though

~~~
bdcravens
Yes. When I'd stay with family or friends that had AOL dialup the first thing
I did was install Netscape. However, this was the late 90s; I'm not sure if
the client created a proper TCP/IP stack in prior versions.

------
sheeshkebab
Looks like an end of the year tax optimization write down extravaganza at
Verizon.

~~~
marktangotango
I also believe this is the only correct answer.

------
icedchai
Yahoo screwed up so many times. They could've been Google. They could've been
Facebook.

It's sad because in the 90's, they were the "go to" place. I knew so many
early internet users who had their home pages set to Yahoo.

~~~
athrowaway3z
I can't say i know a lot about Yahoo. ( Too young and European ). But i'm not
sure they could have been Google or Facebook. I've always perceived Yahoo as
arrogant without a vision. An analog IT company if you will.

Most support seems to be nostalgia. But if somehow Yahoo did buy Google or
Facebook I doubt Yahoo would have been up to the task to make it as successful
as they are now.

~~~
icedchai
They literally could have bought both Google and Facebook if they shelled out
more money. They tried to acquire both companies.

You are right though. They would not have been as successful.

~~~
JulianMorrison
If they'd bought either they would have run it into the ground.

~~~
wtmt
I'd be happy in a world where Facebook is run into the ground!

------
AznHisoka
I miss Yahoo games. That was the only semi-engaging/social part of the site
and they killed it. Dumb decision, almost as dumb as Google killing
Gtalk/gchat

~~~
beams_of_light
I'm really surprised by how poorly Yahoo has managed...Yahoo, but especially
their movies page.

I used to use movies.yahoo.com as my hub for trailers and showtimes, even in
the era of top Google. Now, the first thing you see is a mishmash of
entertainment news, presented in a boring vertical format. There's no
prioritization of the biggest movies being released, no big horizontal banners
sliding with the newest movie releases being shown off, etc. It's boring,
innavigable word vomit on a white background. I can't even fathom why the
decision was made to make it so boring and useless. How could this have
possibly made Yahoo better?

------
scarface74
Is anyone else wondering how the 7th most popular website in the US is
floundering financially?

[https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US](https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US)

~~~
Tuna-Fish
By being very expensive to run. In 2016, they had 8500 employees. In
comparison, the 5th most popular website (reddit) has <250 and has not exactly
been the greatest financial success story either.

The primary business that Yahoo is in is really content production. And
content production just isn't as high margin as search.

~~~
sam0x17
It's just a sign of corporate rot. Yahoo doesn't do anything nearly
complicated enough to warrant that many employees. And I'd be willing to bet
more than 1/3 of them are "managers". Cull the non-engineer/product/design
people I say.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t see how it would be possible to have that many good engineers left at
Yahoo. I would think that most of the good ones left a long time ago and they
are suffering from the “Dead Sea Effect”.

[http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-
the-d...](http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-
effect/)

------
drieddust
> That doesn't mean Oath is actually worth only $200 million in cash — Oath
> said it still has about $5 billion of real assets remaining. On the other
> hand, Verizon calculated that, after taxes, the write-down would knock $4.5
> billion in real money off the company's income in the fourth quarter, which
> ends Dec. 31.

I smell financial wizardary.

~~~
mywittyname
The value of Yahoo is the $5B tax write-off it buys us.

~~~
drieddust
Doesn't make sense. I don't have detailed understanding on finances but Tax
writeoff should be beneficial when you have a valuable assets still in use
which can be written off in book.

In this case they have spend $5B only to write if off the following year.
Something else is going on. I don't think these guys are so stupid.

~~~
dredmorbius
If part of the deal was in stock, that stock has depreciated.

Stock is something a company can create. Cash is something it needs to
acquire.

Stock swap, write-off, devalued stock. No net cash position change. Asset-
liability shift may be worth the market-cap writedown.

------
kevin_thibedeau
What does that say about the value of Verizon management if they couldn't
determine that beforehand?

------
downandout
Not that I disagree with the sentiment here, but there’s a pretty gigantic
footnote in the article that relegates it to the bargain bin of overhyped
clickbait:

 _”That doesn 't mean Oath is actually worth only $200 million in cash — Oath
said it still has about $5 billion of real assets remaining.”_

Oath’s _goodwill_ was dramatically overvalued, but the fact that it has $5
billion in real assets makes it difficult to describe the “almost worthless”
label used in this article’s title as anything but clickbait.

~~~
tootie
It's not clear what those assets are. But absent revenue, it means Oath is
basically just a bank with a mishmash of investments. Same way Yahoo's entire
value is shares of Alibaba. It's extremely valuable even though it's not a
viable business anymore.

------
gerbilly
Worthless to who? The headline seems mean spirited.

A friend of mine used to work at Yahoo in the in the news department.

She said it was one of the best teams she'd ever worked in (they were
supportive with a spurious but difficult legal issue she faced ) and she
pushed out some really great reporting during her one year contract.

It might be worthless _to Verizon_ , but many people enjoyed working there and
I know her articles got read because a few had a national impact.

Of course that is just a microcosm of the overall company, but it's sad that a
friendly workplace gets deemed 'worthless' when so many abusive workplaces are
overvalued.

~~~
elliekelly
Good place to work != Good investment

They aren't making any money. They aren't a good investment to _anyone_ ,
Verizon or otherwise.

~~~
gerbilly
Maybe that's the problem is that we only value as a culture what is valuable
to investors.

~~~
malvosenior
Those investors were most likely paying your friend's salary. Also, don't
forget the _massive_ data breaches Yahoo! has had. They are a huge net
negative on the internet.

~~~
gerbilly
The advertising revenue was likely paying my friend's salary.

The investor's make money off of Yahoo (or lose) because they had enough money
lying around to buy a stock or mutual fund.

~~~
malvosenior
It depends. Companies raise money to scale operations. Without the IPO and
earlier venture capitalists, Yahoo! wouldn't even exist.

~~~
gerbilly
Without the workers, Yahoo wouldn't exist.

In fact workers can form and grow a company alone, but passive investors
can't.

~~~
malvosenior
Yahoo! didn't grow the company alone though, they used investors. Getting a
return on investment is the entire reason a company exists, otherwise it's a
non-profit.

------
zelias
So, Verizon acquired the assets of a couple of failing companies, and then
botched any attempt to generate synergy during the acquisition.

Not surprising? Can't remember the last time Verizon launched a truly
innovative initiative of any kind.

------
ngcc_hk
To be honest it was in the league of amazon and Microsoft. Not that bad.

And could this might just be a tax avoidance move?

~~~
sct202
They just got a new CEO so it might be tax avoidance and also a new CEO
wanting to start with a better so that he wouldn't have to take the write down
later when it would be blamed totally on him.

------
geocar
No shit.

AdapTV and Brightroll were like 90% fraud last time I looked at it.

Yahoo!'s sponsored search is also.... particularly special.

~~~
dmix
Looks like Yahoo sold brightroll in 2017 and Adap.tv isn't even service
anymore...all rolled into Verizon.

~~~
Macha
> Looks like Yahoo sold brightroll in 2017

What makes you think that? Oath is Yahoo.

~~~
dmix
Oh sorry, Google shows:

    
    
        Brightroll
    
        Parent organizations: Yahoo! (2014–2017), Oath (2017–)
    

I didn't realize Oath was owned by Verizon.

------
yvoschaap2
That has been for a long time: the equity Yahoo Inc. held in Alibaba was for a
long period worth more than Yahoo Inc. itself.

------
thrillgore
I'd argue with some of the decisions made with regard to Tumblr, this is self-
inflicted.

Has it not dawned on the Baby Bells that maybe content creation is an
expensive endeavour and its maybe not worth the investment?

------
Tempest1981
Anyone remember Yahoo! Music? Another market leader that is now defunct.

"Yahoo Music was the number one online music site in terms of audience reach
and total time spent in March 2007."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Music](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Music)

Unlimited streaming for $9/mo:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Music_Unlimited](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Music_Unlimited)

~~~
Bartweiss
Wow - I had no idea Yahoo! Music was that big that recently.

Sort of hard to guess how much blame anyone at Yahoo actually bears for that
decline, though. I notice 2007 was also the year Apple released the iPhone and
started selling DRM-free music via iTunes, which has to have been something of
an outside-context problem for a music web service.

In general, it looks a bit like they suffered the same fate as the earliest
smartphone designers. It was a worthwhile product, but practical constraints
rewarded a restricted version (Palm Pilots, wholly local music storage), and
the business fell out of use before there was enough space to provide a
fancier version (iPhones, Spotify) of the same offering.

------
mtgx
As I said when the Yahoo data breach was uncovered, Verizon was should've
reduced the acquisition deal by _billions_ or even scrap it altogether.
Instead they only reduced it by $350 million from $4.8 billion. Dumb.

Either way, I'm actually happy with this outcome, because for one Yahoo was
destroyed due to its data breach and allowing the NSA to put backdoors on its
servers, and second Verizon said it's getting out of the content business.

That can only be a positive for all Verizon customers, because Verizon being
involved in the content business only meant more and more spying on its
customers' web behavior.

Hopefully we'll see more such cases where the value of companies suffering
major data breaches is reduced to almost nothing. Maybe that will change the
industry's thinking about data security and _data collection_ a little bit.

I've also long argued that governments as well as corporations should see data
collection as a _liability_. So that when a data breach happens _and everyone
's data is exposed_, they should be fined into near-bankruptcy. However, if
they minimize data collection and they encrypt the data they do gather in such
a way that even the companies themselves can't access it (end-to-end
encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, etc), then they should be _immune_
from such fines. I figure that would swing the pendulum towards companies
minimizing the reckless "all they can get" collection of users' data.

~~~
matte_black
All you are doing by making such punishing consequences is giving hackers an
actual motivation for breaching public companies.

Right now if data leaks, maybe you get some emails and user data which is cool
but ultimately useless beyond spam value or for identity fraud, or perhaps for
hacking some other financial accounts that may be of some value, but also adds
more risk.

But if you know a company could be utterly destroyed with fines, you can open
up a huge short position on the company and then publicize the breach
somewhere and wait for the stock to drop to zero.

Or maybe you’re a startup and want to eliminate some competitors. Pay off some
hackers in bitcoin to attack and breach their servers and watch them go under.

Better to just leave things the way they are now.

~~~
gnode
You could take your reasoning to physical security, and say that banks
shouldn't be expected to protect customers' safe deposit boxes, because a bank
robber could open a huge short position in the bank, rob them, and profit from
the loss of customer trust.

~~~
matte_black
Nope.

The equivalent argument is that if one branch of a bank gets robbed they
should be fined to near bankruptcy, which would almost certainly cause a drop
in shareholder value.

------
duxup
These companies get scooped up by folks who have no idea what to do with them.

That seems really inefficient.

Not that these were great companies but you'd hope someone(s) could take a
better run at things than Verizon.

------
arafa
I actually quite like the Yahoo Sports iOS app, it's way better than the
bloated, buggy, ad-ridden disaster that the ESPN iOS app is. I used to use
Yahoo Finance like some others here also. And their RSS reader was pretty
decent before. There's some non-terrible pockets of Yahoo still hanging
around.

------
ogou
MAU and DAU. Plenty of companies focus only on those two metrics for
valuation. Oath(Yahoo/AOL) still has massive amounts of both. Yahoo and AOL
mail form an enormous (albeit aging) captive audience. The quality doesn't
matter, only the number. All the other things people are commenting on are
irrelevant to Verizon. What it is writing off is the value of the content
channels, Yahoo Finance, Techcrunch, etc. Yahoo is one of the last companies
actually paying people full-time to produce internet content for their own
channels. That content is not popular enough to sell enough ads against to
meet their projections. So, they just write it off and use it as an excuse to
cull full-time labor costs. It will be contracted out.

------
im1983
Jeez. I sure hope they will keep Yahoo Finanace running.

------
brianbreslin
Can someone explain how the accounting plays out on these write-downs? So they
take a $4.5B write-down in the value of the assets, does that mean they now
have a "loss" to use against their income and reducing their taxable income?

------
skywhopper
While I agree that this was a bad investment for Verizon and clearly it's a
failure in many ways, the justification for the headline is massively
misleading. Writing down goodwill in and of itself is not evidence of
anything. It's an accounting adjustment. The amount of goodwill on the balance
sheet is just there to make things balance (thus the name) after an
acquisition, and the goal is to get rid of the line item eventually.

I guess it makes for an appealing lede with the big number of dollars, but
it's meaningless. Focus on the real evidence of failure, not the balance sheet
shenanigans.

------
Theodores
Is Yahoo Mail worth nothing? I know that Gmail is the main email that people
use for personal accounts but there are millions of people on Yahoo mail and
have been for twenty years. I can't believe that is worthless.

~~~
acdha
The two questions I'd ask are what percentage of those millions of accounts
are actively used and what their cost of providing the service is. I could
easily believe that the costs of processing and storing all of that spam for
people who switched to Gmail a decade or more ago are greater than the ad
revenue from the percentage of users who actually login to the site.

~~~
dragonwriter
I'm pretty sure Yahoo, before and perhaps after the Verizon acquisition, did
more than one “use it or lose it” account purge, intended to sweep out zombie
accounts.

~~~
acdha
I believe you’re right but I would still be curious about the number of people
who logged in enough keep their accounts alive but not enough to make
appreciable ad revenue. Disk isn’t _that_ expensive but it’s not free either
and Yahoo! was never as good as Google at targeting so they can’t have had the
best ad rates.

------
sys_64738
AOL still has a healthy subscriber base to dialup so is at least generating
revenue for Verizon. Perhaps VZ should spin off Yahoo! as a separate entity to
survive on its own. What's Melissa Mayer doing these days?

~~~
utopcell
Melissa ?

~~~
sys_64738
Oops. Marissa.

------
balozi
I agree with their assessment. That's why they should sell both of them to me
for $1 Million. Hey Verizon, if you happen to read this, I will take that
burden off your hands. PM me!

------
kdot
How much money has Verizon wasted trying to create revenue from outside their
core competency. Every venture has been an epic failure.

------
bogomipz
So the timeline of events is:

Verizon insanely overpays for a pair of companies who are in complete decline

Verizon rebrands these companies with one the worst sounding names in business
- OATH

Verizon declares these acquisitions worthless

This expensive mistake will likely be offset by employee layoffs and new fees
levied on existing customers. What a toxic company.

------
dcole2929
It'd be great to see some enterprise, be it another tech company or private
investors, swoop in and maybe rescue a few properties since Verizon views them
as worthless. With the right vision and leadership I still think some of these
could be real assets.

------
walrus01
I'm looking forward to seeing who buys the Yahoo "chicken coop" datacenters in
Quincy, WA and other places when it finally goes belly up.

~~~
konspence
Context?

~~~
walrus01
A long time before the Verizon acquisition Yahoo spent a lot of money trying
to build big google-like cloud scale datacenters in a place with cheap
electricity. If Yahoo is effectively worthless, I foresee some empty space...

~~~
tomschlick
Hopefully some cheap servers will hit ebay then...

------
johan_larson
Wow. I hadn't realized Google is so dominant in online ads. Even Facebook is a
distant second. And Amazon is barely in the running.

~~~
dredmorbius
Within the past year or three, Amazon have been Google's largest ads customer.
So there's that.

Possibly incentive for Amazon to make itself its own best adverts option.

------
cft
Soon the net worth of Marissa Meyer will be more than that of Yahoo.

------
zw123456
There is a reason why the EVP that engineered the deal got fired.

------
yamann
does anybody here doubt that Verizon management didn't know that Yahoo was
worthless before the deal? it's all about connections

~~~
goobynight
Yep. Get a few execs cross-pollinating over the years and you get this. It's
surprisingly common and happens right before our eyes.

------
blastofrocks
Why don't they pivot ? They sure will be having some awesome engineers in
there

~~~
dagw
Yahoo hasn't done anything but pivot for the past several years. Pivoting in
itself doesn't do anything.

~~~
qubex
Continual pivoting has a name... it's called a death spiral.

~~~
tk75x
Only if you keep pivoting in the same direction.

~~~
qubex
If you have equal changes of pivoting in any given direction and use a random
number generator to choose which direction to go in, it's called Brownian
Motion.

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stupidbird
uhh... duh

I'm amazed that they haven't had massive layoffs. They're both popular enough
to the point where they could turn a profit with a significant shift in how
they operate.

~~~
sct202
Be amazed no more, at noon there was an announcement that 1k jobs at Oath
(Yahoo + AOL) will be cut
[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna948001](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna948001)

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agglomeration
Awesome, because Verizon is fucking worthless too. Perfect dumping ground for
more derelict corporate agglomeration.

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aerodog
Marissa Mayer

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jeanlucas
[oh
wow]([https://i.redd.it/xmulu1f6urt11.jpg](https://i.redd.it/xmulu1f6urt11.jpg))

