Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B

I'm surprised Twitter hasn't been interested in Yahoo Finance and Yahoo sports apps. The onboarding into Twitter, integration with tweets would be worth billions. A lot of "regular people" use those apps, and Twitter investors are looking for the user growth. Also, if Twitter is going to become a platform for interests/topics, it would be good to have a couple of standalone apps on some core topics.

I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites. Similar to facebook chat functioning at the bottom/side of the screen while browsing facebook, if you are on Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, or any of the news sites, having chat overlayed. Opening Yahoo News to get to chat. It creates this cyclical feedback loop of opening news to get to chat, and opening chat to get to news.

Obviously with desktop no longer being the dominant market, this might not work everywhere, but Yahoo Finance + Yahoo Messenger was at one point the intercom of Wall Street.

And if there was ANYTHING worth reviving from this entire blob, it would be Yahoo Pipes!

I'm also shocked Microsoft wouldnt want a hand in cleaning this up. Migrate Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into exchange like they did Hotmail. Another stab at the Adtech market, of which they are already partners with this beast. Buy this company and sell the news/dialup divisions. Relaunch AIM and Yahoo Messenger as Skype clients with Yellow / Purple skins, and cross communication. It's not uncommon to sell identical products under different brand badges.

Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance.

It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.

That and their fanatsy sports platform as well. I don't know the numbers at all, but its the de-facto platform for a large portion of fantasy sports. If they made moves into the DFS space I think they would do even better.

There's two dead companies in that title, and the only live one owns content.

Fair point: in a rapidly shifting marketplace, owning the well / mine is the best bet.

Hey come on that's unfair, the jokes on that one will forever remain in the history books

The reason why they are heavily marketing their mmWave 5G is because they are charging an additional $10/mo/line for access and implying (falsely) that most folks with a modern phone will experience a much faster and lower latency connection at most times. In truth, consumers will only be able to connect to the mmWave network on a handful of outdoor street corners in a few metros - the frequency band (60GHz) does not effectively penetrate walls so you're not going to get it indoors.

"Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from.

So - mostly it's fraud.

5G allows for mmWave but does not require it. I have 5G in my area for Verizon but its mostly low band normal 4G frequencies. I have seen mmWave once at the fair grounds and it was nice hitting 1200MBps with tons of people streaming videos etc. otherwise it seems similar to 4G on low band.

The mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground, stadiums, busy downtowns, shopping centers etc. but has poor penetration and range. Verizon looks to be wanting to use is for home broadband use as well with base stations mounted all around neighborhoods. I would imagine they see it replacing WiFi with easily provisioned access points in commercial business etc.

My understanding on low band is its a overlay on their 4G network for now so it works but has almost no benefit. There supposedly is benefits to the low band side such as lower latency and better spectrum sharing over 4G but it's unclear if that applies in an overlay scenario. Moving forward they will probably bring more low /medium bands on as 5G only, perhaps finally sunsetting their 3g network and refarming as 5g only.

A useful 5G network is much broader than what VZ currently has set up in the mmWave range (high-band, >6GHz, high-speed, low propagation)

Verizon's next 5G investment is to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, in the C-Band (mid-band, 3.7-3.98 GHz, good speed, good propagation)

VZ spent $54B on C-Band spectrum in March, then committed to spend an additional $10B over the next 3 years to deploy towers to use that spectrum, and that's above the $18B they had already planned on mid-band 5G CAPEX

VZ is taking on a lot of debt to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, and this sale will help them chip away at that huge mountain of debt

Each G is supposed to be 10x faster and it needs to be at least 2x for customers to care and sub-6 just can't deliver that.

The stockmarket is like a round robin thingy, putting it lightly.

All those who hold shares in FB, combined, are holding paper that is worth 900B. However, if even 10% of those wanted to sell their holdings at a time, the price would fall and the total holdings would be worth less for all.

Now, why are they holding the shares then? Two things come into play. Firstly, say 5 years down the line, the holders have confidence that FB will still be making money, be profitable and be on the market. Secondly, that five years down the line, there is someone else who is willing to pay for the shares at a premium of what they have originally purchased for. Now what about those who are buying 5 years down the line? They too must have confidence on FB that a further 5 years or more down the line, FB will be profitable and will be in the market and keep earning money. And so on and so forth.

So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits.

Can everyone get their worth from the shares? Not at once. Not in a hurry.

Holding those names was an investment failure, as was holding the majority of tech names at that point in history. Trading those names, on the other hand could be lucrative. A friend of mine paid cash for his college education and his car by playing Hand, the maker of palm pilots.

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.

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 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.

"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...

Especially since it's coming from the guy who just sold Yahoo, and he's not going with it.

You should take into account the meaning of “thriller”.

Turn it back into a curated online directory :)

I think it's incorrect to just associate AOL with dialup. AOL still exists as a web "portal" and more importantly as an email service.

My parents (90's) still use AOL email, and have done so for over 25 years now. They used to use dialup, but now are on high speed internet (cable), using just the web interface for the email.

For their sake at least, I hope it doesn't go away any time soon. It works for them very well.

Your 3% number is from 2013 though