This week private equity firm Apollo acquired Yahoo, and various other media assets including what is left of early internet platform AOL, for $5bn and change from Verizon.
Verizon had a master plan to take on big tech when it acquired AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, paying $4.4bn and $4.5bn for each respectively, and merging them into a brand which it called "Oath". Verizon was hoping that combining its other digital assets (which included The Huffington Post and TechCrunch) with Yahoo's large audience would help reinvigorate revenue growth at Yahoo, which had gone into reverse since 2008 (as shown in the chart above). The Yahoo acquisition also came with various other digital properties, including Tumblr — the social networking site.
It was an ambitious plan.
It didn't work.
Less than 2 years later, Verizon reported a $4.6bn write-down of its "Oath" unit, citing "competitive pressures". 8 months later social networking site Tumblr was sold for peanuts (less than a 5-bed house in San Francisco) in 2019 and HuffPost was sold to Buzzfeed last year.
