Sales 2023: US$1,000,000 7 billion (€6.4737 billion)

Overview

At the beginning of May 2021, it was all over. The US telecommunications group Verizon, one of the three big companies alongside AT&T and the merged T-Mobile and Sprint mobile carriers in the US, abandoned plans to compete with internet giants Google and Facebook in online advertising. This was precisely why Verizon had acquired AOL and Yahoo!, names from the early days of the internet, for a total of around nine billion US dollars in the mid-2010s, but had to write off half their value in 2018. In 2021, Yahoo! and AOL were sold to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for five billion dollars. And Verizon Media was renamed Yahoo!

To classify Yahoo! in the IfM ranking, we refer to the The Information estimated sales figures for 2023.

General Information

Headquarters
701 1st Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
USA
Telephone: 001 408 3493300
website: yahooinc.com 

Branches of trade: Internet portals, television, internet
Legal form: GmbH
Financial year: 01.01. – 31.12.
Founding year: 2000 (Verizon), 2017 (Oath), 2019 (Verizon Media), 2021 (Yahoo!)

Basic economic data (in US$ million)

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue Yahoo!	6.474	n/a	n/a	7.400
Verizon Communications revenue				128.292	131.868	130.862
Verizon Media revenue					7.500	7.700
Fios sales				12.139	12.142	11.939
Profit Verizon Communications				13.348	19.265	15.528
Stock price (year end)	n/a	n/a	n/a	57,51	60,40	56,36
Employees	8.000	8.600	8.600	132.200	135.000	144.500

Executives and Directors

• Jim Lanzone, CEO Yahoo
• Tapan Bhat, Yahoo Finance
• Sanette Chao, global communications, corporate media relations
• Lara Davis, corporate strategy, transformation and growth initiatives
• Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, Chief Revenue Officer
• Aengus McClean, Chief Technology Officer
• Monica Mijaleski, Finance Operations
• Lisa Moore, Work@Yahoo, product leadership
• Matt Sanchez, Yahoo's Home Ecosystem
• Alicin Reidy Williamson, Diversity and Inclusion

History

AOL, 1983 as Control Video Corporation Founded in 1989, AOL shifted its focus to Internet access software in the late 1980s. After renaming itself America Online, the company first released the software of the same name for DOS and Windows in 1989. In the early years, America Online's Internet usage was billed hourly; it wasn't until 1996 that a monthly flat rate of just under $20 was introduced. AOL, which distributed its software burned onto CD-ROMs to millions of consumers, became synonymous with Internet access. The number of AOL users worldwide rose from 10 million in 1995 to 35 million in 2002. 

AOL's success made it a takeover target for the old-economy media conglomerates. In 2000, then-Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin announced his intention to merge his company with AOL. A year later, the merger took place, effectively representing a takeover of Time Warner by AOL: AOL shareholders held 55 percent of AOL Time Warner, even though Time Warner was nine times larger, with revenues of $27 billion at the time. It didn't take long to realize that AOL and Time Warner weren't a good fit. This was especially true because the merger occurred just before the dot-com bubble burst, reducing the company's stock value from $225 billion to $20 billion. 

In 2009, AOL was spun off from the Time Warner empire and positioned itself as a digital media company. Former Google executive Tim Armstrong became the new CEO and immediately acquired the regional news portal Patch, which he had founded. For two years, Patch, along with the technology blog TechCrunch, was the core of the new AOL. This changed in February 2011, when Armstrong successfully acquired the international blog network Huffington Post for $315 million and appointed founder Ariana Huffington as AOL's media chief. 

Thanks to the HuffPo acquisition and the purchase of the video advertising platform Adapt.tv, AOL was able to significantly improve its position in the display advertising market. In 2015, after Patch had been sold again, the company became a takeover target again. Verizon ultimately won the deal for $4.4 billion. 

Yahoo!: In 1994, Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo programmed a website called "Jerry's Guide To The World Wide Web," a hierarchical directory of other websites. The two knew that there was great interest within the community for an internet search site, so Yang and Filo developed a navigation aid to organize the rapidly growing web catalog into categories. Three months later, "Jerry's Guide" was renamed "Yahoo!", and the new search engine soon recorded one million searches from over 100,000 users. In 1995, Yahoo! was founded and converted into a corporation. In mid-August 1995, advertisements began to be placed on the website. In 1996, Yahoo! went public, and Yang and Filo became multimillionaires overnight. 

After its IPO, Yahoo! was transformed from a mere search engine into a web portal. However, after six successful years, Yahoo! encountered its first crisis in 2001. Other internet service providers and web portals, particularly Google, were entering the online search market segment occupied by Yahoo!. While a Yahoo! share was still worth $235 in early 2000, its value had fallen to $11 by August 2001. Also worth mentioning is the billion-dollar investment in the Chinese online retailer Alibaba. The value of Alibaba's shares would multiply over the next ten years, even exceeding Yahoo!'s value. 

In February 2008, Microsoft made a much-publicized takeover offer worth $45 billion. However, this ultimately fell through because Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang opposed the purchase of his company. Following mediocre business results and the departure of several executives, Carol Bartz, Yang's successor, was fired in September 2011 after only a year and a half. The stagnating economic situation had made Yahoo! a takeover candidate. Then, in early 2012, Bartz's successor, Scott Thomson, was fired for falsifying his resume and faking a degree in computer science. His successor was former Google executive Marissa Mayer. But the advance praise was of no avail: After four years in which Mayer tried in vain to turn things around through acquisitions (e.g., Tumblr) and original TV series (like "Community"), Yahoo! was officially put up for sale in the spring of 2016. 

Verizon, the telecom giant, traces its origins back to Bell Atlantic, one of the seven "Baby Bells" regional telephone companies that were formed in 1984 when the US Department of Justice ordered the breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly ("Ma Bell"). After the purchase of the telecom company GTE in 2000, "Verizon" was created, a portmanteau of veritas and horizonThe mobile communications division “Verizon Wireless” is now the second largest after AT&T Mobility with around 140 million customers. Wireless providers the USA. 

Oath: Verizon entered the media and content business in May 2015, purchasing AOL for $4.4 billion. The following year, Verizon announced its interest in acquiring Yahoo!, hoping to generate additional revenue by entering the online video advertising market. Two months before the Yahoo! deal was finalized on June 13, 2017 (purchase price: $4.48 billion), Verizon also announced that it would combine AOL and Yahoo under the umbrella brand Oath.

But the structure wouldn't last long in this form. A year and a half after its founding, the company was rebranded. In December 2018, Verizon had to write down $4.6 billion in value due to the poor performance of its online assets. Its entry into the internet advertising market had failed, and advertising revenues fell far short of expectations. While Google and Facebook controlled approximately 58 percent of the digital ad market in 2018, Oath only accounted for 3.3 percent. In 2017, it had only 4.1 percent. And Oath disappeared. Since 2019, the company has been renamed Verizon Media.

management

Jim Lanzone, born in 1971, is the CEO of Yahoo, with over 20 years of leadership experience in technology and media. Previously, Lanzone was CEO of Tinder, and before that, he spent nearly a decade as president and CEO of CBS Interactive, a top-10 global internet company with brands ranging from CBS All Access to CNET.

Business segments

Yahoo! brings together a total of 18 digital brands under one roof, including AOL and eight Yahoo! portals (Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Fantasy, Yahoo! Life, Yahoo! Sportsbook, Yahoo! Entertainment, and Yahoo! Finance), the tech magazines Techcrunch and Engadget, rivals' college sports news, autoblog, and the websites for women Makers, Built by Girls, and In The Know, as well as the app analytics service Flurry. Some of the best-known brands have since been sold, including the Huffington Post (to Buzzfeed), Tumblr (to Automattic, the operator of the blogging platform WordPress), and Flickr (to SmugMug).

Current developments

AOL, Yahoo!, and others changed hands again. In 2021, Verizon's media division was sold to the private equity group Apollo Global Management for five billion US dollars. Parent company Verizon retained 10 percent, and the group's new/old name will again be Yahoo!. This marks the provisional end of an odyssey of the largest internet companies of the 1990s, which are now essentially nothing more than speculative assets for financial locusts. Traditional media companies no longer want anything to do with the sites, which still attract around 900 million visitors. 

Verizon's original plan to merge AOL and Yahoo! into a data-driven online advertising giant (Oath) that could compete with Google and Facebook failed. The company intends to focus entirely on its telecommunications business in the future. Apollo will now make every effort to eventually sell the various high-revenue online brands at a profit. A key role in this will be played by Verizon Media's new identification tool ConnectID, which was developed as an alternative to traditional advertising cookies and could also be expanded to include other media activities—for example, the media division of the cable company Cox Communication, which Apollo also acquired.