According to reports that are starting to trickle in, Yahoo’s board has accepted the terms of the Verizon offer we reported last week.
The core assets of the company that started life in Jerry Yang and David Filo’s 1994 Stanford dorm room as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and at one point was one of the highest valued properties on the internet — will now join another former high-flyer of the internet’s earliest days, Aol (full disclosure: the owner of TechCrunch), in the Verizon stable.
It’s hard to overstate how dominant a player Yahoo once was. The company, which now holds most of its value in its Alibaba investment, was once a $125 billion behemoth that dominated internet search and commanded one of the highest valuations of any online business — it was Google before Google was Google.
Like Aol, Yahoo was never able to fully recover from the dot-com crash. The advent of Google (and then Facebook) pushed both early Internet portals further toward irrelevance as one Google’s search algorithm prevailed and Facebook a new method for browsing online — replacing monolithic portals with personalized feeds tailored to the tastes of social networking peers.
And in the age of mobile browsing and apps, the company’s relevance eroded even further.
Yahoo grew up with the early Internet and for a time it was the site for nearly everything. From an online directory, the site ballooned to include email providers (Four11), web hosting services (Geocities), and video and radio simulcasting through the $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com.
Complete article here
The core assets of the company that started life in Jerry Yang and David Filo’s 1994 Stanford dorm room as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and at one point was one of the highest valued properties on the internet — will now join another former high-flyer of the internet’s earliest days, Aol (full disclosure: the owner of TechCrunch), in the Verizon stable.
It’s hard to overstate how dominant a player Yahoo once was. The company, which now holds most of its value in its Alibaba investment, was once a $125 billion behemoth that dominated internet search and commanded one of the highest valuations of any online business — it was Google before Google was Google.
Like Aol, Yahoo was never able to fully recover from the dot-com crash. The advent of Google (and then Facebook) pushed both early Internet portals further toward irrelevance as one Google’s search algorithm prevailed and Facebook a new method for browsing online — replacing monolithic portals with personalized feeds tailored to the tastes of social networking peers.
And in the age of mobile browsing and apps, the company’s relevance eroded even further.
Yahoo grew up with the early Internet and for a time it was the site for nearly everything. From an online directory, the site ballooned to include email providers (Four11), web hosting services (Geocities), and video and radio simulcasting through the $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com.
Complete article here
