The news that media/telecom giant Verizon has obtained the core businesses of Yahoo for over $4 billion comes as no surprise. The deal had been in the works and the Verizon executive leadership had been interested and stated that interest for months regarding the potential acquisition of Yahoo.
The component that I think myself and others in the general public have with this deal is two-fold: the huge companies seem to just get even larger, and one of the last big names from the glory days of “the Net” has gone by the wayside.
This news is just further evidence that the world is changing and that the technologies and methods of communicating are shifting away from the traditional ways we had once utilized the internet (email, news sites, blogging) to an even faster paced use of social media sites, instant messaging applications, Instagram, and Snapchat.
In fact, part of the Yahoo business portfolio which was very attractive to Verizon in this transaction was the social media platform called Tumblr (which I have a blog site called “The Write Path”) which will be folded in to the stable of other Verizon owned websites with targeted advertising planned for that millennial demographic which frequents the platform.
Verizon, which purchased AOL previously, will most likely merge Yahoo with AOL in a combination of two former internet powerhouses to compete against Google and Facebook. That being stated, the expectation from Verizon and everyone else with knowledge of that industry is not that Verizon anticipates surpassing those two behemoths, it is the fact that being in that top tier with the amount of advertising dollars floating around is still a great spot to land in.
It is estimated that about one billion users a day visit some portion of the Yahoo family of websites. In my own experience, having written several contributing pieces for Yahoo through their freelance news division, the sites have a network of really devoted users. That was the main driver behind this deal for Verizon: the ability to get that many users looking at their mobile advertising. The number of loyal users for Yahoo properties enabled them to leverage a better deal from Verizon than was initially anticipated.
The other winner out of this deal is the NFL and football fans because Verizon streams games on Sundays and they can expand their reach with Yahoo as the NFL looks to sell streaming rights to their other live game packages. That is going to be an interesting development to watch closely in the coming months.
The demise of Yahoo is sad to me on a personal note because I have been a loyal user on their site since the beginning and have worked for them as a contract writer for a period of time as well. The concept for the company and the brand was very well thought out at one point, for many of us, Yahoo was our introduction to the wide world of the internet and to search engines.
It has now gone the way of so many other companies or brands in America, it has been consolidated by a bigger company. The company changed the way we all did things and it changed our collective lifestyles. It will now evolve into something else as the internet and social media makes a new turn into a new area of which is still yet to be determined. It is the nature of things, but it is still sad to see another iconic brand go away.
The internet has shaped how we get information: news, restaurant reviews, recipes, and stock market reports. It evolved into social media and the next step will probably be one of further customization and networking of people together in a unique platform. It will be interesting to see how Verizon reinvents Yahoo to adjust to those changes in the terrain.