Verizon will also gain Yahoo’s email service, which boasts 225 million users, and several of the company’s advertising technology assets, including Brightroll, Flurry and Gemini. “We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished”. The company already profits from the data plans that connect more than 100 million people and their devices to the internet. “We want to compete and that’s the place that we need to be, so we’re very pleased with where we are today”, Walden said. But she and Tim Armstrong, chief executive of AOL, said it had not yet been decided if she would have a role at the company after the deal closed in early 2017. She invested heavily in improving Yahoo’s mobile products, expanding its audience through the acquisition of Tumblr and doubling down on premium media content. She brought in TV journalist Katie Couric as Yahoo’s “global anchor”.
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The takeover will double the size of Verizon’s digital advertising, placing it as a distant third behind Google and Facebook in the US$187 billion market. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL lag far behind and have lost market share.
Mayer, in an interview with Reuters, said she still saw a “path to growth” for Yahoo, especially in mobile. He said concern about US gasoline stocks combined with anxiety over European banks: “Concerns about the Italian banking sector threaten to rear their ugly head again this week as all European banks undergo stress tests”.
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, says that she plans to remain with stay till the deal is completes. MarketWatch reports, these assets will continue to be held by Yahoo, which will change its name at closing and become a registered, publicly traded investment company.
Yahoo was created in 1995 by Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo and was the go-to search engine for millions of Americans learning how to browse the internet.
But Yahoo strayed from internet search in an attempt to build a multimedia business, clearing Google’s path to supremacy.
Yahoo’s days as an independent company are nearly over – the company’s core business has just been sold to telecom giant Verizon for $4.8 billion in cash. Those investments, made more than a decade ago, have been the most valuable pieces of Yahoo throughout Mayer’s tenure.
On a conference call with analysts after the announcement, Mayer repeated that line before adding, “A lot of the integration discussions are still ahead of us”.
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The suit – filed in January by plaintiffs’ lawyers from Kirby McInerney and Kerr & Wagstaffe – argues that Yahoo’s officers and board members have dedicated a huge percentage of their time since 2013 to figuring out how to split the company’s money-losing Internet business from its profitable Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes. It instead chose to explore a sale of its core assets, spurred on by activist hedge fund Starboard Value.
