Twenty-one years ago, Yahoo became the soul of the nascent web. Now it’s telco food, to be eaten by Verizon for $5bn.
Verizon is also the proud owner of AOL, snagged last year for $4.4bn. At their height, the two lynchpins of the 90s’ WWW were worth about $350 billion—at least to those unlucky enough to buy tech shares in 2000.
Verizon plans to unite the two companies to create a Facebook-killer made of nostalgia and its own users’ personal information—and the zoo of startups and internet publishers the two companies gobbled up in their dying years.
The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook.
Verizon bought AOL – another faded internet star -in a $4.4bn deal last year, which gave it ownership of the Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Engadget and other news sites.
Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers – which is tied to their handsets – with the tracking information already gathered by AOL’s sites.
Update: It struck me that Yahoo is custodian of Tumblr and Yahoo Answers, two of the last real refuges for girls and young women on the ‘net. Verizon will want to kill or heavily sanitize both.