Verizon seeking sale of media assets & AOL in $5 billion deal

Telecom giant Verizon is reportedly exploring the sale of assets including parts of Yahoo, and AOL, plus news sites Techcrunch and Engadget in a deal worth up to $5 billion.

Six years after it bought AOL, and five after it took over Yahoo, Verizon is looking to sell off both. The company spend over $9 billion to buy the two, and is now said to be shopping them around for around half that.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is looking to abandon its own digital media efforts.

Across Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, and the company's news sites, the division had been expected to achieve $10 billion revenue by 2020. Instead, despite a growth in the second half of the year, the company finished 2020 with $7 billion.

Verizon is said to now be focusing less on its own digital assets, and more on partnership deals. It is offering bundles of Hulu and Disney+ with its home internet plans, for instance.

The Wall Street Journal says that private equity firm Apollo Global Management is in discussions to buy the assets for between $4 billion and $5 billion. Neither Apollo nor Verizon have confirmed the talks.

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13 Comments

crowley 15 Years · 10431 comments

About 3 years ago

Is AOL even worth anything any more? Does it still have presence in the US?

[Deleted User] 9 Years · 0 comments

crowley said:

Is AOL even worth anything any more? Does it still have presence in the US?

The brand name itself likely has value just by virtue of it being so recognizable but I have no clue what that price tag would be. They have a U.S. presence. They stopped being an ISP some time ago but were doing some media content creation and publishing.

Fun fact. AOL was originally the product of a company called Quantum. Quantum released AOL as a rebranded product that was called AppleLink and was a joint venture with Apple to offer dial up BBS for customers. So at some point AOL started as an Apple product.

rs0212 9 Years · 25 comments

crowley said:

Is AOL even worth anything any more? Does it still have presence in the US?

Still has quite a few dial-up customers, mostly from rural areas.

I still pay $4.95 a month for CompuServe (an AOL subsidy) to keep my eMail address, and I'm sure there are plenty of others out there who do as well. Put it this way, you have to pay to use the AOL software and they keep it updated and it's actually not bad to have a browser, email, and file download manager in one. The last "true" CompuServe software was version 7.0 released in 2001, and wasn't compatible with any OS after Windows XP. And there's enough of us paying CompuServe users for AOL to have put in effort to rebrand the AOL software for CompuServe users with the name "CompuServe Desktop Gold," the CS logo, CS specific icons, and the blue color scheme in 2019. Now that branding might not seem like a big deal, but for a publicly traded company to put any amount of time into updating software for the first time in 18 years, I would imagine there are a significant amount of us paying users to justify that. And that's just CompuServe, a minute amount of users compared to the greater AOL base.

I know basically every other email (including AOL) is free now, but I've had my email address since my dad signed a 3 year contract with CompuServe back when I was in high school in order to get a subsidized computer, and so many people have my @cs.com email address, it would be impossible to give everyone I know a new email address.

Plus, like I said, there's quite a few people in rural areas who still require dial-up.

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

Fun fact. AOL was originally the product of a company called Quantum. Quantum released AOL as a rebranded product that was called AppleLink and was a joint venture with Apple to offer dial up BBS for customers. So at some point AOL started as an Apple product.

That's right; I forgot! Yes, AOL was actually available exclusively on Mac for years. It was only with version 2.5 or 3.0 that they became available for Windows. I believe 5.0 was the last version made for the Mac until "AOL Desktop for Mac" came out in the late 2000s for Leopard and Snow Leopard. That was shortly abandoned, too.

williamh 13 Years · 1048 comments

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

crowley said:

Is AOL even worth anything any more? Does it still have presence in the US?

The brand name itself likely has value just by virtue of it being so recognizable but I have no clue what that price tag would be. They have a U.S. presence. They stopped being an ISP some time ago but were doing some media content creation and publishing.

Fun fact. AOL was originally the product of a company called Quantum. Quantum released AOL as a rebranded product that was called AppleLink and was a joint venture with Apple to offer dial up BBS for customers. So at some point AOL started as an Apple product.

I was the AppleLink user. I was working in Japan and they had dial-up there. I think I was accessing FirstClass message boards through it or something like that.