Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL firms to Apollo for $5 billion

Verizon will market its media team to private fairness company Apollo International Administration for $5 billion, the two companies announced Monday. The sale enables Verizon to offload properties from the former world wide web empires of AOL and Yahoo. Verizon will retain a 10 % stake in the company and it will be rebranded to just “Yahoo.”

The sale will see on the net media makes beneath the previous Yahoo and AOL umbrellas like TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance and Engadget go to Apollo. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion in 2015, and it purchased Yahoo for $4.5 billion in 2017.

There has been increasing proof lately that Verizon wanted to provide off its media houses and as an alternative focus on its wireless networks and other internet provider businesses. Last yr, Verizon offered HuffPost to BuzzFeed. It also recently sold off or shut down other media qualities like Tumblr and Yahoo Answers.

Right before that, Verizon’s authentic vision was to change Yahoo and AOL houses into on-line media behemoths that could choose on Google and Facebook’s dominance in on the web marketing. Beneath former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, the Yahoo and AOL models ended up converged into a new on the web media division in Verizon referred to as Oath.

But the Oath venture mostly unsuccessful to acquire momentum, and Armstrong remaining the firm in 2018. Oath rebranded once again as Verizon Media Group in November 2018 and was run by Guru Gowrappan. Gowrappan will continue to guide Yahoo below Apollo.

With the sale of Yahoo and AOL, Verizon signaled it is no more time interested in media, compared with its rivals. AT&T is however making an attempt to increase WarnerMedia into a streaming competitor to Netflix and Disney, even as it struggles with loads of debt from its media acquisitions. Comcast, an additional internet provider, is nonetheless in the media business as properly with NBCUniversal.