Verizon Selling Yahoo & AOL
• Verizon announced Monday that it’s selling its media assets, including Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, about half what it bought them for, according to AdWeek — Verizon acquired AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 and bought Yahoo for $4.83 billion in 2016.
The media assets, currently known as Verizon Media (once called Oath Inc.), include Yahoo, AOL, the tech news sites TechCrunch and Engadget, virtual reality studio RYOT, among others. The company will take on the Yahoo name, and Verizon will retain a 10% stake. Under new ownership, they will be rebranded under the Yahoo umbrella. The deal also includes Verizon’s ad tech business.
“We are excited to be joining forces with Apollo,” said Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan. “With Apollo’s sector expertise and strategic insight, Yahoo will be well positioned to capitalize on market opportunities, media and transaction experience and continue to grow our full stack digital advertising platform.” As AdWeek states, “Yahoo and AOL were once darlings of the Web economy, but could never fully keep up with the evolution of the internet. AOL’s $350 billion merger with Time Warner in 2000, for example, is commonly cited as one of the biggest failures in the history of media.”
Verizon has been in selling mode of late — last November, Verizon spun off HuffPost to BuzzFeed in a stock deal, although layoffs quickly followed. In 2019, Verizon sold the social media site Tumblr to WordPress parent company Automattic for $3 million. Yahoo had acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion just six years earlier.
