Yahoo General Counsel Ronald Bell could receive as much as $9 million in severance payout as a result of Verizon Communications’s $4.8 cash acquisition, according to the company’s filings. Analysts say that Verizon’s purchase of AOL has yet to prove its value, although Armstrong is a well-regarded operator. Even if that’s the case, Handa believes Verizon is overpaying for Yahoo’s assets. Now it’s making plans to control more of the advertising on those devices. Through all of these assets, Yahoo has access to more than one billion monthly active users globally, according to the official press release.
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Tensions between users and the Yahoo parent company can perhaps best be summed up by CEO Marissa Mayer’s controversial comments in 2013: “There’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore”.
“It would be premature and presumptive of me to discuss what Verizon may or may not want to do”. Then, in 2008, Microsoft made a bid to acquire Yahoo for a whopping $44 billion.
Verizon’s deal for Yahoo could give the phone company a stronger foothold in digital advertising as it takes what it knows about its customers’ whereabouts and combines that with Yahoo’s popular destinations and AOL’s advertising expertise.
The development may lead to job losses for thousands of current Yahoo employees.
The proxy puts the company’s CEO Marisa Mayer as slated to receive $54.8 million in severance payout, its chief revenue officer Lisa Utzschneider at $19.8 million and its chief financial officer Ken Goldman at $16.1 million.
The company, which came 22 years ago and shook up the tech world, suffered from time to time due to other competitors and lost ground as time went on. Both companies continue to impact people’s daily lives, so what Mayer says is technically true. “But better late than never”.
Following the sale of its internet business, Yahoo will be left with its $41 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan. Once valued at $125 billion, the company has long struggled to keep up with new technology and startups.
The numbers are a flawless reflection of Mayer’s time at Yahoo.
“The Yahoo brand still holds a lot of consumer-affinity” and could help Verizon overcome the lukewarm feelings that many subscribers have toward their wireless service providers, said Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk.
However, because Verizon is merging Yahoo with AOL’s operations, it could also merge everything under the AOL brand name.
New labor contracts will generate about $500 million in cash savings, Verizon said.
Despite its prominence, Yahoo was the internet’s perpetual adolescent. Verizon reported overall revenue of $30.5 billion, a decline of 5.3 percent from the same time past year.
Still, that’s a big drop from the 99% rating Mayer saw back in 2012 when she first started.
The FCC and President Barack Obama’s administration “must ensure that deals like Verizon/Yahoo don’t further erode the little privacy Americans enjoy today when they use digital media”, he added. “I am incredibly proud of all that”. The shares closed up +0.44 points or 1.15% at $38.76 with 15.98 million shares getting traded. Yahoo rejected the offer, saying it was “substantially undervalued”. After co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo began building a web directory as Stanford University computer graduate students in 1994, Yahoo quickly established itself as the online hub for tens of millions of people. The company supports Internet infrastructure services.
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Yahoo’s Tumblr blogging site is another matter.
