Verizon set to buy Yahoo's internet business for $4.8 bn

New York, July 25: Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless communications service provider, was set to acquire Yahoo's ailing core internet business for about $4.8 billion on Monday.

The deal will allow Verizon to get Yahoo's online assets including search, mail and instant messaging, along with its ad technology and land holdings, tech website Quartz reported.

The deal will mean an end to the struggle to survive for Yahoo, which was valued at over $125 billion at its peak in January 2000 when the dot com bubble was nearing its end.

Following the sale, the company will be left with about $41 billion it invested in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba as well as Yahoo Japan.

Verizon makes most of its money from mobile phone connections while Yahoo generated more than twice as much revenue from search and display ads on desktop computers than it did from its so-called MAVENs businesses (Mobile, Video, Native and Social). If we look closely, Yahoo Mail struggles while its Messenger is almost nowhere. The only known Yahoo business today is photo-sharing website Flickr.

Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo follows its acquisition of AOL which has properties like The Huffington Post, Techcrunch and Engadget, among others.

Marissa Mayer, who was appointed Yahoo CEO in 2012, struggled hard to try to position Yahoo as a "mobile" company.

The acquisition provides more evidence that it sees online content and advertising as a primary way to increase growth, according to Quartz.

It is expected that by combining various tools from AOL, Yahoo, and its own operations, Verizon might be able to mount a credible challenge to Google and Facebook -- its two dominant competitors.

Verizon may also leverage millions of viewers of Yahoo's News, Sports and Finance to complement its own popular properties like TechCrunch and Huffington Post.

Earlier in June this year, executives from the micro-blogging website Twitter met Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to discuss merger possibilities.

However, according to the New York Post, Twitter appeared mainly interested in taking information out of Yahoo and it bowed out of the bidding process soon. Twitter CEO Dorsey did not show up for the Yahoo meeting.

Trying to revive it's ailing business, Yahoo, which was found in 1994, also held talks with Facebook in March this year about an advertising partnership to allow the social networking site to sell ads on Tumblr.

IANS