Will Verizon buy Yahoo? It looks that way. Yahoo, once an Internet pioneer, is a ghost of better days. For months, bigger companies compete to buy them out. Verizon might be the winner.
Sources say Verizon could purchase Yahoo in the very near future. The price tag would be $5 billion. If you recall, Verizon bought another online pioneer, AOL, last year. That cost $4.4 billion. If this deal goes through, they can combine AOL and Yahoo. Verizon wants to be a major social media player, like Facebook, Twitter and Google/You Tube. Even rival bidders are confident a Yahoo & Verizon acquisition will happen. Nobody else would pay $5 billion for Yahoo. A source at Yahoo said this deal was easy to close. But how can Verizon fund this acquisition? Didn’t they just spend over four billion dollars getting AOL? Verizon board members insists there’s nothing to worry about. One said, “There is no worry with Verizon about financing or as many questions about integration…”. Where does Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer stand in this? Apparently, she helped put this deal together. Mayer and AOL executive leader Tim Armstrong worked together at Google long ago. In 2014, Armstrong proposed Yahoo and AOL merged. Mayer denied the proposal.
Now, it looks like Verizon will buy Yahoo. It’s not certain. No date or press conference is set. But this deal looks like it’s going to happen. Just think, two years ago Mayer virtually scoffed at a Yahoo/AOL alliance. Now, it looks like a Yahoo/AOL alliance is happening, whether she likes it or not. I still don’t like mergers. I probably never will. But with Yahoo’s recent woes, this one might be necessary. I don’t want to see two historic online giants being an afterthought. And if this potential merger helps them keep their legacies alive, then so be it. But can this forming trio compete with Google, Facebook and Twitter?