I'm really surprised that Yahoo Finance has not been spun out as an independent company at this point. I think as a stand-alone company it could easily be worth in the billions of dollars.
Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.
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.
My off the wall suggestion would be for Coinbase to acquire them. They certainly have enough firepower to do a stock acquisition.
The Yahoo Finance portal would run as a subsidized loss leader to on-ramp new customers into crypto investing. Setting up the portal to put crypto assets on the same footing as traditional assets would do a lot to appeal to older or more conservative investors who view crypto as "magic Internet money".
Plus a lot of people are interested but have no idea how to acquire crypto assets. People are used to being able to see all their assets on their favorite brokerage's platform. Yahoo could set it up so that if someone looks up a chart for DOGE-USD, that they have a one-click opportunity to buy it off Coinbase's exchange.
I doubt that you can make that as a blanket statement, either. There are probably plenty of conservative investors who do include some cryptos as part of a well-balanced asset allocation. It is, after all, starting to make plenty of inroads into the mainstream financial industry.
What you don't see much of is conservative investors who are super hot on crypto. Not necessarily because of anything about crypto, per se, so much as because part of being a conservative investor is that you don't really get super hot on anything.
I would say 95% of investors don't understand crypto, whether they have high or low risk tolerance. But high risk tolerance investors are more likely to invest in something that has momentum without understanding the fundamentals. Betting with the momentum is often a good strategy.
Change that to "95% of crypto investors don't understand crypto" and you've got it.
Betting with the momentum works unless (A) you're a latecomer to a ponzi scheme, or (B) there's a reversion that catalyzes longstanding doubt about an asset that has enjoyed a bull run. Both of these cases may well be applicable to a large portion of the overall crypto marketplace.
Tell that to investors in Fitbit or Palantir (for example) before they sold off after having good "momentum". Crypto investors don't even understand crypto, but that doesn't mean anything, because you can be left holding a long term bag whether you understand the underlying asset or not.
If you actually understand "investing" you will understand that you can't beat the indexes and are doomed to failure by trying to use "momentum" to do anything other than lose money.
"Momentum" is bullshit reasoning to buy anything as volatile as crypto. The only reason investors struggle with crypto is because it has no "fundamentals" to analyze.
It doesn't seem like he's invested in any crypto directly. He has investments in some fintech, but as far as I can tell those aren't in any companies where crypto is the main component of their business plan. It's also important to distinguish between his opinions on the potential of distribute ledger technology vs. crypto currencies themselves. You can have the first without the second.
There are also levels of conservatism: Buffet still takes risks. In any given year, there's a possibility that he loses money, even if he's amazing in the long term. This is very far from the extreme end of conservative investing where, for example, someone 2-3 years away from retirement shifts all of their investments into a low-yield guaranteed return investment to ensure that a temporary downturn in the economy doesn't wreck their ability to retire.
Most people claiming they understand (risk, tradeoffs, market, actual adoption) cryptocurrencies are lying to themselves. It's easier to buy $KWEB than read an article written by Vitalik Buterin.
> Just FYI, 'conservative investors' do understand crypto, they just think it's a bad investment.
That statement is demonstrably false. There are two reasons to not be invested in cryptocurrencies at this point in history. You are either ignorant of the technology (which is fine, lots of more important knowledge out there), or it doesn't fit your current risk profile.
There is not a knowledgeable person on the planet who would say that any investment in any cryptocurrency is bad for all investors.
if anyone pushes you on blockchain-anything or cryptocurrency, deliver unto them a kick to the groin, or a punch to the face, then run away. for you have been targeted by thieves.
edit: later I am proud to have been downvoted by blockchain bozos.
It’s not that it’s hyped, it’s the large scale and empty essence of the hype. The essence is “it’ll go to 500k”. It’s an echo chamber of get rich for nothing excitement.
Yahoo Finance already tracks the cryptocurrencies. Has for ages. You can also integrate in exchanges to buy stocks, wouldn't be hard to add crypto to that. BTW, you can't buy DOGE-USD on Coinbase. Here it is in my wife's portfolio:
I am not sure Yahoo finance is the right place for this kind of integration. If they were to integrate buy/sell and portfolio it would be more of a plaid style where you can connect your existing broker. You would lose a bunch of users who don't want to switch to coinbase. This is why i was thinking a media company would make sense for the media asset. It should be something more neutral.
I believe the Yahoo's suite of fantasy sports apps is second only to DraftKings in terms of market size and DraftKings' market cap is $22b. No reason that couldn't be spun off as its own company and be worth a $5b itself with the right leadership.
I am guessing you are looking at daily fantasy sports and not fantasy sports in general. DraftKings and Fanduel do not have a 90% market share on the entire fantasy sports industry. I believe Yahoo still has the largest market share when it comes to traditional fantasy sports and has done a poor job translating that into success in DFS in which they are fighting for 3rd place. That is why I threw in the caveat "with the right leadership".
I think Twitter is OK with drugs and adult content being trendy, but not OK with politically incorrect ones. There has to be a manual approval process, but effectively invisible, because in my opinion, an automated and non-supervised system for trending is a recipe for the disaster.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have evidence of abuse, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you have no specific evidence, then posts like this are not allowed. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.
I really wish there was incentive to have products be "done". It seems that so many products get to a great state and then get made worse over time because we need continuous growth (Evernote immediately comes to mind. Others seem to feel similar about 1Password) or in the case of Google, get shut down.
Yes indeed. I get Evernote but not 1Password. The issue with Evernote for me was it kept getting slower and they lost me when they changed pricing, I felt they had lost their way and it was really easy to change note apps. I prefer simpler note apps today, even Google docs or Word. 1Password is good, the windows app could be better and browser integration is a pain but it’s solid.
> I really wish there was incentive to have products be "done".
Easy, just use version numbers which asymptotically approach an irrational number, like Knuth's TeX (currently at version 3.14159...ish)
But seriously, the incentive to be "done" is when a lot of other software relies on your API or file format. This is why mozillans throw such a tantrum whenever anybody tries to use their rendering engine as part of some other piece of software. Getting to "done" isn't fun.
I think the first charting software was written by one talented javascript guy. I think he moved on and the next person did not want to touch the code. Which is the story of many Google services.
Yes, it really was quite perplexing. I imagine the "reason" was to make it more mobile-friendly or mobile-first or perhaps just to standardize their properties more. However, as you noted, it really degraded the product. I went from a daily user to an almost never user.
"mobile-friendly or mobile-first" seems to be a trend in quite a few companies, in the last few years. The main problem is, the completely ignore the desktop design, viewing it as an either-or proposition, for some, unknowable reason. While it's understandable that much traffic is mobile, during office hours, especially during work from home (which will probably - at least partially - be a continued trend moving forward), quite a bit of traffic will be from a desktop/laptop. Simply ignoring this market share seems to be a fools errand.
Yahoo Finance is and always has been the best finance site. Mostly because they license all the additional data you really need to investigate a company and Google was never into that sort of thing.
I wonder if it would be a conflict of interest for a brokerage that focuses on retail investors like TD Ameritrade to buy the platform. Robinhood and the other upstarts are eating their lunch with UI improvements, but anyone who can type in a stock ticker has figured out Yahoo Finance over the last decade.
Isn't "Think Or Swim" already TD Ameritrade's Yahoo Finance killer? I'm not sure where there is a conflict of interest for a stock broker to supply analytics to their clients.
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.
> I actually think their real opportunity is reviving Yahoo Messenger / AIM over the top of web sites.
YM! at least has been killed. They've migrated the service and one day I received a notification that all my contacts and the message archive would be deleted.
Verizon killed commenting on the news section last year, so I doubt they would be interested in revising the instant messaging functionality of YIM... Maybe the new owners might take this route, it remains to be seen.
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.
Hey Ben, just curious where you found the $100M-$250M annual revenue number? It sounds about right to me (looking at traffic numbers and estimated CPMs / conversion to Yahoo Premium), but I've dug for a concrete figure in Verizon's annual reports and never surfaced anything.
Is that revenue from ad impressions? They did $1.3bn in their last public quarter, and in that earnings report they lump it in with homepage and sports in the one place it's mentioned, so I don't think it's particularly important (to them).
Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
> Also, what does it do that retail brokers don't offer better and for free now? News aggregation?
A lot of it is about presentation.
Brokers may "have" the same info as Yahoo Finance or finviz, but if you have to dig through ten pages to get to it and or their charts look like a 1990s website, there's still room.
A lot of more serious investors find themselves paying out of pocket for trading tools like stockcharts/tradingview/finviz/Y!F Plus, because these tools help them be more productive because actual thought and care has gone into the products.
But this is the reason why Bloomberg Terminals are worth $20K/year/seat. On paper, you can find a lot of the same info online for free, but the interface itself is a huge value-add.
Yahoo Finance Premium is a low rent version of Bloomberg Terminal. For $35/month you can get close to Bloomberg level data. Bloomberg Terminal costs $1,900 per month.
Totally agree. Thought this for years. Consider that YCharts licensing fees are around $4K per year per customer for their paid products - that could have been an amazing business for that division.
But boardrooms aren't known for their innovation. You'll score more points in that environment pointing out potential risks. Suggesting a risky, innovative approach is not a great strategy if all you care about is tenure on a board.
I recently dropped the premium fin.yahoo for a paid simplywall.st account. During my research I found many alternatives. Even my broker has all the data that fin.yahoo offers.
> For Apollo, it’s an opportunity to further invest in the digital media space — an industry it has already put money behind with deals for Shutterfly, Rackspace and Cox Media.
Cox Media was my first employer (it was called Cox Interactive Media at the time), Verizon Media, my current employer.
At the time, I was on the team that ran CIM's web farm which hosted the web presence for all of Cox Enterprises' newspapers, TV, and radio stations. It was a couple dozen Sun Ultras with content on NetApp filers.
We ran the farm from Atlanta and connected to it over frame relay. We were colo'd in a datacenter in Sunnyvale. We were a few racks. Yahoo had a presence in the same DC. It was a room or two, PC's running FreeBSD and also quite a few NetApps.
The biggest spike in traffic we ever saw was when the Starr Report was released.
A couple years later, I was working for Loudcloud, now living in Sunnyvale. Visiting another datacenter, I recall seeing a bunch of exposed motherboards mounted in racks on simple trays. It was an early Google presence:
Today, I work as part of the mobile tools team for Verizon Media. The product I'm responsible for is hosted in a combination of AWS and Verizon Media datacenters.
In some ways, there's been a lot of changes over the years, but in other ways, not so much.
What I used to run on Solaris, today I run on Linux, sometimes on a VM or in a container, but sometimes still on a dedicated server. What I used to code in Shell or Perl or C or Java, today I code in Shell or Python or C or Java or Go or JavaScript. What I used to package into RPMs, today I package into docker images. Databases are still databases. SQL is still SQL. Application servers and web servers are still application servers and web servers. The web is still the web. Input still can't be trusted. Buffers still overflow. Applications still crash.
If you won big on a gold/oil/internet strike you were much, much better off buying as many shovels you could at any price and mining for all you were worth.
Selling shovels is a reliable, lower risk business for a while. But Sun/SGI/Cray/Dell/Nortel/etc show the risks that come with relying on shovel income.
…“it agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.”
They apparently paid $4.4 billion for AOL, and Yahoo they got for $4.48 billion.
I have to say: only losing $5 billion while handling the decaying corpses of AOL and Yahoo is, weirdly, kind of a triumph. These are cursed properties, and bring only despair.
Though I’m surprised they didn’t try to keep ahold of the sports bits of Yahoo, which are seemingly popular. (Perhaps that’s why they even managed to get $5 billion for…what does AOL do?)
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.
That reminds me of the movie Frequency, in which the characters can use a ham radio to talk across time. A person from the future gives a cryptic hint to the person in the past by telling him to pay attention to "yahoo". In the ending scene of the movie, the younger man's fancy car bears a license plate with that name.
It's funny to think that Yahoo was once thought of as an amazing stock tip to give someone. The movie came out in 2000 and was presumably written/filmed 1-2 years prior.
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.
Amazon is smaller than Verizon Media in this space. Microsoft and Verizon Media are not independent - Microsoft handles Verizon's search ads, Verizon handles ads on other Microsoft properties: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/ad-products/...
That said, single market players like TheTradeDesk or Xandr are larger in their own markets than verizon media, but probably not compared to the combined publisher and advertiser business: https://www.atlantic.net/vps-hosting/top-10-dsp-providers/
Ah interesting. Yeah, I’m not sure how a full proper ranking or comparison for digital ad market would be done. There’s lot of ad networks including the DSP list. Ad spend perhaps? Most of the major sites or apps that are only for their own property don’t include outside ads. I’m thinking LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, Reddit, Yelp.
I’m not certain on all of this though. Chumbox ads (Taboola, etc) have proliferated to a whole range of sites including top ones by now too.
But then IAC, Verizon Media’s biggest properties, would be a mix of different things.
They had good customer base initially. AOL has done so many acquisitions for like Adaptv(video advertising platform), Millenial Media(mobile advertising) etc which were pretty successful. Later ofcourse Yahoo. Failure started coz they platform integration plan didn't work as expected. Lot of talent from the acquisitions left. They still use lot of old tech setup for advertising, web platforms. In summary, they failed in making a single platform from acquisitions they had.
Writing off $5B means a ton of money for Verizon. Right there we can see they already didn’t actually lose half of their investment spend.
Most people’s lunch is being eaten by the big two. Snap had to go with a different ads biz model to not directly compete with the big two.
It doesn’t stop Verizon Media, now Yahoo, from being the 5th or 6th biggest ad[tech] and online ads business. I’m hedging 6th in case there’s some one else between Microsoft and Amazon.
Aah..my bad..I missed that..but that was vision(advertising + publishing) of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong..he was almost successful until Verizon acquisition and later Yahoo merger.
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.
Apollo can be thought of as garbage disposal for tech companies.
They provide enough capital for a corporation to keep running while systematically stripping it down until only the most profitable core remains, then re-IPO'ing that husk of the company. Along the way, they make the most use of financialization to extract as much benefits as they can.
They serve a purpose in the ecosystem I guess. Its better than the company devolving into irrelevance or collapsing at once. Graceful termination means that everyone can wait for a ferry to take them away rather than jump ship.
Can someone help me understand this from an investment perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup their investment through dividends and such over the last 25 years to justify that market cap?
Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?
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.
For highly valued tech stocks I’d add that there is some presumption that these companies will acquire or build their way into major new sources of revenue that throw off vast profits.
With tech this might be implicit if they are “profitable and still in the market.” But it is different than say John Deer or Miller Paint in that regard.
I was thinking like a game of musical chair. If you sit down too early to lose, but when the time comes, you better sell quick or you'll be left standing with nothing to show for it.
The value of a company in a fair market is a function of the confidence of investors that someone in the future will pay more for the same stock.
For a highly profitable company like Facebook, this isn't a foolish confidence in anyway. Even if you don't like Facebook it would be a very radical position to take to think that their profits next quarter will be remarkably lower than this quarter.
In greater fool theory, you know there is no reason the investment is going to increase in value. You are just hoping someone else is going to buy from you and accept that risk too.
Thinking like that is what drove AOL and Yahoo! to their peak valuations. It's not that the companies didn't produce something of value and have some level of earnings, it's that their stocks priced in a fantasy land future that could never be achieved. At some point, there will not be someone willing to pay more, or even the same amount, for the stock.
When you are counting on the 'confidence' of future investors to (over)pay more than you did for something, rather than any rational valuation, you are quite literally counting on a greater fool[1] being willing to buy it from you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory - note that it isn't always about an asset having no value, just that for an overpriced asset that there will be someone else willing to pay more for it.
Sure, one could argue that AOL and Yahoo were overvalued at their peak. They had low existing earnings and the price was supported by expectations of magical new profits.
But that's a difficult argument to make for Facebook. Facebook is highly profitable - they have averaged something like 80% gross profit margins for a decade[1] while sustaining significant revenue growth. That's pretty much guaranteed that their stock will continue to appreciate - with margins that high they have a lot of room to play with things to keep growth going.
What metric makes it look like that is a greater fool situation?
I don’t think you can make an argument against the present valuation of FB on a historical performance basis.
Investors will tell you that historical performance does not guarantee future performance. It’s one yardstick, but it’s not always the best one.
Facebook’s historical revenue growth was catalyzed by environmental factors that are shifting underneath them.
In 2021, FB would not be allowed to acquire Instagram or WhatsApp. In 2021, Apple (custodians of their most valuable user base) is no longer cooperating with adware.
What does future revenue growth for a Facebook look like, who is not allowed to acquire upstart competitors, who is not allowed to extract maximum value from its mines, and who is facing regulatory scrutiny for past deeds?
Would you be willing to bet that $900B, or $300ish/share on $30 revenue/share have these uncertainties priced-in?
Yahoo! and AOL were dumpster fires in comparison, of course. But I wouldn’t be so certain that FB hasn’t passed its peak valuation, just because it has had a money printing machine for the past decade.
Despite all these technology challenges we love to discuss on HN, the truth is that last quarter every single metric except US/Canada daily FB users was up. Daily US/Canada users fell by ~0.5% but this was more than offset by a 1% growth in EU.
Their average revenue per user increased by the largest amount ever (in both absolute and percentage terms) last quarter.
In terms of technology challenges, the iOS changes will reduce FB's ability to target ads. However, it is quite possible this will lead to more revenue for FB because the market structure (ie, domination by FB and Google) means FB maybe able to pass on the loss inefficiency to advertisers.
Right, but notice that wasn't the emphasis of the post I was responding to. OK, there was 1/2 a sentence that touched on profits as almost an afterthought.
The thing that sets me off about these threads is the (I believe sincere) thinking that 'well if that's the share price, it must be worth that much'. That's fine if you're speculating/trading but is absolutely wrong if you think what you're doing is investing.
> OK, there was 1/2 a sentence that touched on profits as almost an afterthought.
Are we reading different posts? The post you responded to repeatedly made the point that profits are one of the key builders of market confidence:
>> 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.
...
>> 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.
...
>> So is FB really worth 900B, yes, if the holders keep holding it and FB keeps earning profits.
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.
"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...
A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.
If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me.
Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )
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.
Yes - dense environments with good line-of-sight should work well for 60GHz (train stations, airports, concerts). Enormous channel capacity for a short, straight hop.
They have deployed a bunch of mm towers in the metros. LA went from a few blocks to having widespread coverage since last summer. Still not worth the extra $10 a month and the reduction on battery life. I have my 5G disabled. 5G ultra wide is only useful for home internet as a replacement for cable based internet.
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.
>mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground
Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ).
It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story )
That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested.
So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )
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
FWIW I'm bummed it didn't work out. I had a WiMax phone and even with the spotty coverage, back then (~2012?) my speeds were as good as my current broadband speeds (>200 Mbps) which was phenomenal for sprint. I even considered getting a dedicated WiMax internet provider at the time. Amazing how fast that came and went!
I had WiMax from Clearwire. It was really epic. The dongle on my laptop delivered speeds that weren't even available wired at the time. I used it in Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago, Newark, and a few other cities, and coverage wasn't bad at all.
The only difficulty was that it had a hard time penetrating buildings. In my apartments, I could get 1-2 Mbps anywhere. But if I moved the modem into a window it was more like 25-75 Mbps.
I hope that some day 5G will be as good as WiMax was.
I had one too and the enormous drawbacks of WiMAX became apparent: go deep enough into a building and the signal gets spotty fast. WiMAX may work well for fast wireless internet to thin-walled homes, but it just doesn't work as well as a mobile technology.
>A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.
There is.
>He added that Apollo would allow the business to grow, a more difficult prospect when it was operating within Verizon, which was planning to spend even more money to expand its next-generation 5G wireless network.
mmWave doesn’t penetrate glass or brick making it pretty useless as a wireline replacement. Unless you want to go through the trouble of mounting an antenna outside, assuming of course that you access to wall with direct line of sight to a 5G tower.
mmWave is a tool to cope with network capacity concerns far into the future. It's in its infancy right now but the ability to provide multiple gigabits over the air in certain high-traffic locations can help greatly. We're running out of midband spectrum that can provide good indoor/outdoor coverage and so it's best to look to much higher frequencies that don't have any major incumbent users to satisfy those capacity needs.
Before people go all ballistic, please remember that yahoo and AOL make $700 million from Mail and a billion dollars from search. AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts(for older people though). So the sale price is approximately two years of revenue. Apollo is getting it cheap!
“AOL sells huge number of paid dialup based email accounts”
Do they really?
I am not being sarcastic. I cannot find a recent reference to this (everything seems to be from 2015), but given my experience getting my aunt away from AOL email: it seems horribly plausible.
“The number of dial-up users is now “in the low thousands,” according to a person familiar with the matter.”
…but, yeah, it seems 1.5 million discerning customers are basically paying for AOL mail.
“There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private.”
You have to read financial reports of aol if you can get hold of it. AOL doesn't want this info to be too widely known. Then all the old people will realize they are paying $25 per month for something that they can get for free!
This reminds me of the guy who traded a paper clip for a house... only in reverse. Every time these companies get traded, more gets added to the bundle and they sell for less money.
Soon it’ll be Yahoo & AOL sold for an NFT of an illustration of a pile of used AOL CDs.
I used to work at Aol, and it doesn’t surprise me that some significant number of people still use dial up. Not because they’re “trapped” but because that’s the only choice in some parts of the country. According to Pew, 3% of us are on dialup & more than twice that use no ISP (maybe that 7% just uses their mobile access?).
… I’m not sure, but it seems plausible that if 3% had to use dialup 100% of those are on Aol (who else offers dialup?). So there’s probably a lot of money to be milked from that cash cow; along with their other ad & publishing businesses.
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.
I looked up the Census numbers last year, and for my county it's something like 17% of people have no internet access -at all-. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on a cell phone. And this isn't exactly the boonies. It's a county with over a million people in it.
Three percent of people being on dialup sounds low to me.
My first reaction is that this is really good for everyone.
For Verizon, as they aptly spun it, it allows them to focus on their core business. I'm not in Media or Telecom, but from the outside looking in, the synergies between those two segments aren't obvious.
For Yahoo / AOL / Verizon Advertising, these can be repackaged into sets of assets that "make sense" so that they may be sold to strategic buyers and ultimately have a better home than being the ugly duckling in Verizon's portfolio.
For Apollo, the benefits are obvious. There's probably lots of operational improvements to execute on, again due to the fact that Verizon was likely not really focused on these businesses. Presumably the fund will reap huge returns if they can deliver on these improvements and exit successfully and timely.
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EDIT: There is one more nuanced question I forgot to address: is this "really good" for the employees to? On an individual scale, probably not. I'm sure many people will be let go once Apollo is at the helm. But from a broader view, it is arguably "good" for everyone collective in the long run. Verizon really can't do much with the asset, so the alternative to selling is letting it wither away in the hopes of some miracle, with the more likely outcome being that Yahoo and AOL would become even worse shadows of their former selves with each passing day.
Eventually people would be let go anyway and those businesses could be shut down unless some miracle strategic buyer (i.e. not a private equity owner) came along and bought them. But most strategic buyers are not comfortable buying bad operations and turning them around. They find it too risky, so that's usually a job left to financial sponsors like Apollo who are built for that. In fact, these days most PEs are not even interested in turning operations around because they also find it too risky—and sponsors learned they can make more than enough money by just being great at finding sub-scale / non-core assets, putting them together in a "platform" and selling them to another sponsor or exiting through an IPO.
Do you really believe Apollo won’t gut up Yahoo and AOL or some other situation where any leftover spirit of the entities isn’t mostly gone? This is better than remaining with Verizon since they don’t want to deal with such small stuff. Here’s hoping things end up better for assets.
Venture Capital firms love to use throw debt at an asset so that they can have a cash windfall. The result is that the assets can never pay off the debt and end up declaring bankruptcy.
See K-Mart, Sears, Toys R' Us, and anything that a vulture capitalist touches.
Venture Capital firms are early stage private investors. They don't do LBOs with dying companies, since that would naturally be a late stage investment. You're probably thinking of private equity.
Your view of how LBOs work is really misinformed. You picked 3 famous PE deals that failed, but those are exceptions.
Apollo alone has done 150 private equity transactions, the vast majority of which have been tremendously successful otherwise investors would not be giving them more money to continue to invest.
A lot of PE follows a well-understood playbook. Buy a player in a settled industry, cut costs (== reduce maintenance, make the workforce cost less, etc.) and milk it for as long as possible.
That tends to work for investors; customers and employees, well.
The Artist Formerly Known as SolarWinds is PE owned.
I can’t find information on how Apollo Group runs it’s PE portfolio. I assume they will eliminate costs and merge businesses where it makes sense. The press release mentions brick and mortar opportunities but Apollo doesn’t own major brands outside of Sprouts and GNC. It sounds like another miss for Yahoo again.
I believe Apollo has a big stake in several casinos. Yahoo’s sports/fantasy data is probably their most valuable & viable site. The regulatory environment surrounding online gambling, sports gambling, and daily fantasy gambling in particular has been changing rapidly and, despite being well situated from a technology standpoint, Yahoo hasn’t made much of an effort to capitalize on it. I’m guessing Apollo plans to find a way for the Yahoo sports data to work with their casinos to get on the legalized gambling gravy train.
Is Yahoo hiring? How's the pay? I think it'd be kind of fun to work for a zombie Web 1.0 giant in a weird sociological way. My first email address was @yahoo.com -- thank you for losing/forcibly deleting all my embarrassing teenage missives.
I've definitely noticed Verizon being more willing to deprecate old services in Yahoo/AOL/Oath over the last few years. Do you expect this to speed up (i.e. leadership was being conservative) or slow down (they were chopping too much/all the chopping should, in theory, be done)?
What does it mean for something to be related to 5G? Actually related, or part of the "5G AI cloud" marketing buzzwords that don't seem to mean anything?
Lots of stuff.. Finance is huge, Mail, Sports, Techcrunch, Engadget... Plus the Edgecast CDN and video platform service (VDMS). Was honestly hoping Verizon would keep those so I wasn't lumped into the Apollo sale.
Is Yahoo actually turning a profit, if so which service contribute the most?
Also, are there any stats explaining why so Yahoo still have so many daily visitors? Is it just result of having a ton of service and then the numbers afe bundled? It seems hard to understand that pages like Yahoo (or msn.com) would attract so many users as the Alexa ranking would suggest.
Comscore’s data collection relies on users installing their shady monitoring software - I imagine users who install such software are significantly more likely to have a yahoo email account. Same issue with Alexa ranks.
At that price I’m surprised some crypto millionaire/billionaire or hell at this point an NFT artist didn’t just buy it as a joke, tokenize it and flip it for profit.
It may sound like a joke or sarcasm but it’s not, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we see this AOL/Yahoo turn into some type of crypto play that can be marketed on the back of the old brands.
I do get the feeling of an underlying crypto play marketed on the old brands AOL/Yahoo.
I didn’t even think about something as simple meme stonk. It may sound like sarcasm and a joke, but look at the meme stonks or Doge ($11B+ market cap)...sure the kids on tik tok might not know what yahoo or aol are/were but that actually makes them fresh to the new generation, mixed in with a little nostalgia from those slightly older that would love to jump on the next rocket going to the moon...it’s seriously just 1 Elon tweet from a doubling in value.
See Reddit Wall Street Bets (WSB) for a sample of the culture, I think the most popular example would be the entire Game Stop debacle.
Lots of opinions on the matter but essentially, Wall Street players shorted the stock, “Main Street” day traders got wind of the play and pumped the stock (in one instance it would have resulted in loses in the billions of a single fund and probably bankrupted them), either that fund or a major investor of that fund is an investor in Robinhood which is an app used by a significant number of the main street option traders pumping game stop stock, Robinhood allegedly on the order of said investors/fund froze certain orders on game stop stock (and a few other meme stocks) for about 24-48 hours which sank the price of the stock and allowing Wall Street to minimize their losses and close their positions. Of course Robinhood has done what it could on their end to distance themself from the investor/fund and on more than one occasion made official statements why they stopped orders on the cherry picked stocks, basically falling on their own sword and more or less saying they were under funded and over leveraged.
You can sort of trace the recent crypto market pump to this event, as a result of Main Street throwing in the towel (right or wrong) because the collective acceptance market is rigged.
I suspect the true total cost was a fair bit higher due to a hosting arrangement. I'd imagine Tumblr remained on Yahoo bare metal servers for quite some time after the sale. If so, Automattic would have had to pay a significant monthly fee for this, given Tumblr's large infrastructure footprint.
That arrangement would have been quite appealing for Verizon, since by this time there was likely a surplus of aging bare metal servers in Yahoo's datacenters, and these would otherwise be difficult for Verizon to monetize.
disclosure: worked for Tumblr but left long before this sale and not directly familiar with any of the specifics of the deal
Huh, OK. So you're saying the $3m price included the many months of continued hosting and bandwidth in Yahoo's datacenter? Quite a bad deal for Verizon if so, especially accounting for routine hardware maintenance.
This was never in doubt. Everyone knew this was going to happen. Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it? I have a feeling this is some kind of tax avoidance scheme. Knowing nothing about taxes and accounting I will let knowledgeable people correct me.
Yahoo is still in wide use by people and AOL owns a number of properties and has a decent ad business. It may be that these companies were trying to extract value from them. This happens a decent amount these days. It's less about salvaging a brand.
I still use Yahoo Finance. Not extensively, but I haven't found a site I like better for getting random stock quotes & sifting through lightweight financial information.
Yeah same. They have an API that is fairly consistent for stock stuff. If you're gonna do deep diligence there are better tools but for sniffing around, yeah they're good.
In the past few years I've come across several businesses (landscaping, home repairs, etc.) that have been communicating with me using Yahoo email addresses. Many people forget that Yahoo mail was the "Gmail" of its time, and many of those users are still around, especially non-tech oriented users and businesses who have no incentive to switch to anything else.
I still have a verizon.net email address (managed by AOL) that I use exclusively for sites that are likely to spam me. The torrent of political email I got at that address before the last election was amazing to behold.
> Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it?
Apparently so. Or at least that's my distinct impression from working at a Yahoo subsidiary at the time of acquisition by Verizon. It appeared that Tim Armstrong had legitimately convinced the top Verizon execs that a combination of AOL + Yahoo would somehow create an advertising titan capable of competing with Google and Facebook.
It's quite surprising that they went through with this, given that it's a pretty ludicrous notion: a single major brand/company comeback is challenging enough in tech, but the merger of two of them at once? There's no historical precedent for that succeeding, as far as I can think. Especially with a new name as objectively terrible as "Oath".
Internally, morale was never good. It didn't help that Tim would send out weekly all-company emails that were, at best, a nonsensical word salad of business strategy jargon straight from HBO's Silicon Valley.
Literally all of the Verizon execs who were involved with this calamity are long gone now, and Verizon's previous CEO retired in 2018. My impression is the new CEO basically just wants to focus on 5G and get rid of this mess of bad acquisitions.
> Are non tech companies really that foolish to think they can salvage a brand that was relevant 10 years ago and revive it?
Sure you can, though branding isn't the only way to make a successful business. Kleenex knock-offs thrive even though nobody ever says "please hand me the Generic Tissue Paper". Assuming there are professionals involved (not just rich techbros that have held on since founding) tech companies should be operated the same as non-tech companies. Build a good product, keep costs down, drive sales, put away cash, grow your market.
Once AOL and Yahoo were acquired, it should have been possible to convert them into factories for generic content and services, and service many small brands. But you need an experienced executive and management class that can do this efficiently. It's much easier to turn an acquisition into an poorly-run independent cash cow, or plunder its IP and eliminate it.
I've seen acquisitions go many ways. In some, the parent company may end up more like the acquisition because its business or product was more robust. Other times the point was to obtain some tech and absorb it into the parent company's products. Other times they just wanted a steady cash flow and a foothold into a new market. Sometimes they keep the acquisition fairly independent, because it already has a strong brand and products and they seem to be fucking up less than other acquisitions. Sometimes the companies' execs were literally just golf buddies and one just decided to help the other out of a bind. Sometimes they have no idea why the fuck they bought it or what to do with it, some moron at the top just thought "we need an X, we'll figure out what to do with it later". Sometimes
Give me an instance this kind of salvaging happened in tech. Tech and non tech differ a lot in this case, one cannot use the generic business pattern there. People run of tissues and every time they run out, they seize being a customer and are new customers in the market looking for a brand. That is when discounts, shiny packaging etc help. Tech is not that way. There is an enormous entrenchment with things like email and even news readers. Particularly in online services, People don’t switch, that is the reason why the biggest sites are so loathe to changing the smallest things on their pages. In the same vein, companies that go out of favor don’t ever come back. I am trying to think of examples of any that might have but am unable to. There are tons of brands that are either sold off as acquihires or just left for dead and ignored though.
Maybe all Verizon wanted were the names of the people who were signed up with Yahoo so they could glean all their ones and zeros as well as some cash selling them phone plans?
I had to look up whatever became of CompuServe and Prodigy. Interestingly enough, it looks like Prodigy was acquired by Yahoo in 2001 and CompuServe was acquired by AOL.
I'll buy Yahoo. I got <checks wallet> $48.67. But when I buy it, I want to be CEO. Don't worry, you only need to pay me half of what you paid the previous CEO. I promise I will only devalue the company by half as much as any other selection for CEO you already have. Think of it! That's 4x the value!
I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left; rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her vision.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
> started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity.
This seems like a good assumption to make anytime a company is sold.
I wonder how things would have gone had Microsoft been successful in its acquisition of Yahoo. The value of the Altaba assets don't make the offered price seem quite so crazy in retrospect.
This could be a steal IF Apollo can fix the management and leadership issues at both companies. There's a real opportunity with both companies - both have pretty high revenues to only go for 5B. If you can cut down on operations cost OR use the ops cost to create more revenue, you can turn garbage to gold. They have a large number of engineers at both companies - I have to believe that with this number of engineers, you can find ways to make money if you get management under control.
Verizon held Yahoo / AOL for about five years, they were bought at different times. ATT bought Time Warner a little less than three years ago. I think it will take longer for them to give up on that, but I bet they will start selling it (in parts) in three to four years.
I know people here are saying, but WB is valuable! It is, but they are doing a great job of tanking it.
I doubt it was anything specific. The simple combination of "user-generated content platform" and "hadn't received any staffing support for many years" means it's a huge potential liability for abuse claims, copyright infringement, etc.
Verizon's marketing has been "5G, 5G, 5G". Verizon Media was the one part that was not so obviously linked to 5G. Their other two segments, residential and business, could clearly sell 5G to customers. So by ditching their non-ISP division, it's a focus on their ISP business, which is gungho on 5G.
Absolutely. I'd then sell Yahoo's Finance and Fantasy Sports divisions off for a couple billion dollars profit, and try to flip the rest of Yahoo at a pawn shop so I'm not stuck with that absolutely cursed company.
As fun as your comment is, it literally doesn’t add anything to the conversation. The question is why buy at all.. your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is?
> your argument is that the parts are worth more than the whole. Is that all the thesis is?
Yes. Just about everyone on the planet is aware that Yahoo is a cursed company that you should stay extremely far away from, but if you look exclusively at the two divisions it does well in (three if you include Japan, which you shouldn't as it's basically a separate company) then they're actually totally competent and profitable systems, which would justify this price tag on their own quite handily.
Given the recent Yahoo! Answers news, it seems like Apollo is thinking along the same lines, and are only interested in the good bits of this acquisition.
AOL was a big brand name as a dial up provider right? Why didn't they just move into dsl, cable, fibre, mobile broadband, etc? It seems like they abandoned that business completely and moved into media.
As many nerds as there are who grew up on AOL, I'm surprised they haven't yet gotten together GameStop-style and bought AOL for themselves, to put into a nice retirement home. :)
A lot of people use it for fantasy sports because... I'm not sure why but they do. Also its impossible to set up email forwarding with them so I have a very old email address I keep active.
Back when I was working with a bunch of fantasy football fanatics, they considered Yahoo the second-best site for doing so. ESPN's site was considered better, but those running leagues with less tech-inclined folks knew more people had Yahoo accounts already.
Ah, that's actually a significant loss. It's quite useful to be able to search for when you signed up for X or Y years ago.
Most of the time you don't need it but when you do it's really valuable - e.g. I recently recovered some tiny at the time sums of crypto that were worth a few thousands now that way.
Yeah recently I had to replace the HID bulbs in my motorcycle. The Amazon ones were junk so I wanted the same ones I originally bought 11 years ago. Sure enough there was the email from 2010 and the company still had the same bulbs.
I worked at HuffPo right after AOL was acquired by Verizon and before AOL/Yahoo became Oath. During this time Arianna left; rumor was she was forced out or at the very least, her power was undermined/neutered by Verizon and she was unable to fulfill her vision.
Shortly after was the 2016 election. It was very surreal to be working there, while everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win and then Trump won, without the namesake leader at the helm.
As time dragged on, it started to become obvious that Verizon was starting to extract as much value out of the acquired AOL web properties at the expense of quality/brand integrity. Then came subsequent layoffs and now HuffPo really is a shell of it's former self.
Similar things have happened elsewhere in the media world. I've seen some of them first-hand within the org. It was hard to watch a 100-year old magazine of note continuously stretched to its possible thinnest by the parent company because the returns were not what they blindly promised and seemingly wanted to reduce the price of the properties to make a sale cheaper. Thankfully in that case the company who purchased the properties is actively working to bring them back to their former selves.
I went to HuffPo just now. It appears to be same sort of stuff from years ago. HuffPo never had the rep of a shining beacon of journalism or even integrity.
> everyone on the editorial staff was sure HRC was going to win
I will always remember the HuffPo homepage masthead, which showed HRC with a 98.5% chance of victory, right up until the end. Probably didn't help her situation.
Adtech is the most active market, that's pretty merged with Yahoo's businesses these days. A lot of stuff that wasn't actively branded AOL was run by AOL too, like huffpost, techcrunch, engadget, etc. though Verizon has sold a decent amount of that off prior to now. Also mail/aol.com still has users among an older cohort.
Do not work for AOL but know that their email service is still heavily used. I have a family member who pays a monthly fee for basic email and refuses to give it up.
DDG was a collection of perl scripts around Yahoo BOSS (Build You Own Search Service), which is now backed by Bing. Nowadays, DDG has vastly outgrown its original serving by adding their most crucial ingredient: Privacy FUD.
I still think Yahoo is not worth 5 billion. Sure, it makes some revenue from mail and ads, yahoo mail is essentially the AOL of our generation. Ppl hanging onto it and the new kids dont even know about yahoo.
As per your link, Yahoo has about 4 Billion monthly visitors.
Average Click-Through-Rate for web ads is about 0.5%.
That translates to about 20 million ad clicks per month.
Average Cost-Per-Click is about 0.5 USD, meaning Yahoo earns about 10 Million dollars from ad clicks.
Lets triple it, considering exclusive deals, ad deals, etc. So thats 30 M USD per month, or about 360 M USD per year.
Still is it worth about 5 B USD?
Also note that this is current rates. Internet is a finicky business where if you drop off the radar of the most active users, you will lose revenue very quick.
So the risk adjustment factors for companies like Yahoo will likely be very high.
$360M in profit wouldn't translate to a "dead" entity, but if we're to focus on your numbers then Google (that has 24.4X more monthly visitors) would be earning about $2.9B to $8.8B per year from ad clicks. As in most cases: garbage in, garbage out.
Why is it important for you to call Yahoo "dead" ?
I worked at Yahoo Travel until 2011. When I left, transition to Linux was in full swing. If there's any FreeBSD left, the host count has got to be tiny by now. Running two OSes is a pain, and Linux has bigger mindshare, so there you go.
Vespa was extensively used for vertical search when I was there. Things like content search inside Travel, Local, Finance, Shopping, etc... was either Vespa or a predicessor. I don't think Vespa was used for the general internet search engine, but may have been used for some of the side queries that happen at the same time.
Too big to generalise. Shared tech stacks would be hard to call modern, but various tech stacks within teams were better. The more worthwhile stuff is open sourced (Athenz, Screwdriver) but there is a lot of shit internally, in varying stages of "deprecated but still the defacto solution".
> Still have any FreeBSD running?
I mean, there's probably some freebsd 7 hosts _somewhere_ and some of the internal tech stack supports it, but mostly it's RHEL6 when I left with a presumably-completed-by-now RHEL7 migration planned.
> Do Yahoo actually use Vespa [1] for their search engine?
Can't comment on search, but a partner team to my old team did.
Under their Oath umbrella, Verizon operates domains (such as wow.com, love.com, etc.) that customers still use for email, do you think they’ll sell these assets off?
Hopefully this indicates that control over all verizon.net email accounts will fully revert to Verizon. Well, more like a blind wish. AOL mail management has been a little onerous - like mandating quarterly login to the webmail portal, else get locked out of POP access.
Reportedly Yahoo Finance has revenue between $100M and $250M annually. With the increase in retail interest in investing it seems like a property that could have some growth potential behind it if they did things right and separate from Verizon.