It has been building for a year or so now, an end of an age as it were. Last week wireless telecommunications giant Verizon gave a heads up that their negotiation to acquire former internet giant turned floundering firm yahoo, will be finalized before this week is out. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even get halfway. Only this Tuesday both companies announced that the inevitable has taken place. For the sum of $4.48 billion – a pitiful shadow of its highest valuation at the turn of the millennium – Yahoo, or rather its core internet assets, are now part of the Verizon umbrella.
A new Oath
After over twenty years’ worth of a rise and fall, this June 13 Yahoo lost its independence and is even split in two, with its central assets now befalling the same fate as its former rival America Online (AOL). Both are now subsidiaries of Verizon, and pretty soon they won’t even exist under those names. The telecom company means to merge these two units to form a new digital media subsidiary, a sum of their greatly reduced parts. This company will be called Oath and will focus on online advertising. Verizon hopes to use the (still impressive) user reach of Yahoo as a means to turn the Facebook vs. Google ad battle into a three-way contest.
Not everything is wine and roses with this development, however.
With the fusion of two different bodies of staff into one for Oath, Verizon has decided to cut off 15 percent of that combined number. That’s 2,100 employees of what used to be Yahoo and AOL who will not be continuing on as part of the merger. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s non-internet assets will be reorganized into a new entity called Altaba Inc., which is nothing more than a holding company for the old firm’s remaining major stake in the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba.
Last boss of Yahoo
Seeing as the Verizon-backed Yahoo-AOL merger into Oath will see AOL’s CEO taking the helm of the new entity, Marissa Mayer, soon to be the last CEO of Yahoo, will be stepping down. CNN Money reported that an early company filing would have it that she’ll be walking away with a $23-million severance package to boot.
It’s the least that can be done after Mayer’s last frantic push to somehow regain relevancy for Yahoo by competing with mobile apps and hewing to a younger demographic. Her measures that did much but never enough.
All in all, it’s an ignominious end to the pioneering company that started as a web portal, grew up as a pillar of the dot-com boom and dwindled as a relic after the bubble burst. Even as Yahoo becomes Oath or Altaba, former personages who have worked for the company have branched off into their own ventures like LinkedIn and WhatsApp. In them at least, the legacy of Yahoo lives on.
