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.
