What does the Verizon buy out of Yahoo mean to the Philippines?

[OnMyWay]

39 minutes ago, Tukaram (Tim) said:

 

I have had my own domain since 2002?  So I do my own email

Just like Hillary!  I'm sure the Russians are reading your e-mail as we speak!  

[Gratefuled]

19 hours ago, Dave Hounddriver said:

I use Yahoo for an ancient email address that I have had for decades but I can't think of anything else I use Yahoo for.  What do you use Yahoo for?

I also use yahoo email address. So, one of the things I am curious about. I wonder if it will change to verizon.com. I use Yahoo to read about events here in the Philippines and around the world. I use it to check sports activities and standings. I'll be using it to read the latest on matters that interest me that I  may have missed from television. For instance the recent Republican and Democratic Conventions and speeches. I know that I can get a lot of this information from Google and sometimes I do but my main search engine is Yahoo.

[Dave Hounddriver]

1 minute ago, Gratefuled said:

I know that I can get a lot of this information from Google and sometimes I do but my main search engine is Yahoo.

Ahhhh that's why.  I feel the same about Google.  I thought Google had taken over the world when it came to searches but it seems some, like yourself, still use Yahoo.

[Gratefuled]

10 hours ago, OnMyWay said:

Not quite sure what you mean by this?

They provide home phone and cable TV in some areas, and also provide internet over those lines.  They already own AOL, but I'm not quite sure what AOL does these days.  Like many, AOL was the first internet connection I ever had, back in the 90's.

Yahoo put itself out for bid and Verizon made the deal.  The value is in the advertising revenue.  Yahoo has over 1 billion users.  Yahoo mail has been my main e-mail for many years.

I read that Verizon's rational is that they want to compete with Facebook and Google for the billions in advertising revenue they are raking in.

I doubt that much will change for a Yahoo mail user.  Mail and the search engine will be around for a long time and that is where most of the ad revenue is.

Ok, not sure but I think Yahoo has more users than Facebook, Twitter. Maybe "monopoly" is not the correct term to use.

I had a Verizon back in California. I know how their system works. I liked it. I wish I could  have kept my phone here in the PI and used it. I still have it with all the phone numbers in it. 

So, not sure how the Verizon buyout will affect me. I'll adjust. I'm pretty sure it will be better than the phone service I have now.

[Dave Hounddriver]

Here's an interesting article from an author who seems to think Yahoo has already had its day:

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/does-the-snapchat-generation-even-know-what-yahoo-is

DOES THE SNAPCHAT GENERATION EVEN KNOW WHAT YAHOO IS?

The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo—the brand and its Internet properties—by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era—Web 1.0, for lack of a better term—that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones. Like Verizon’s similar purchase, last year, of another ancient bauble, the once ubiquitous dial-up service AOL, the acquisition of Yahoo speaks mainly to the past. Tomorrow’s Internet users don’t dream of using Yahoo’s properties any more than they do AOL’s. Instead, they lavish their attention on Instagram and Snapchat, Musical.ly and Spotify. And software continues to move in directions far removed from the early Web, as new voice-based interfaces, on devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, train us to think about the Internet beyond browsers and smartphones.

For the past few years, as Yahoo has desperately sought to reverse its fortunes under its latest C.E.O., Marissa Mayer, I’ve been pointing out that the company is going around in circles, reminding us that in Silicon Valley, unlike on Wall Street, there is no such thing as too big to fail. And yet Yahoo and its backers continued to tout the potential value to advertisers of its gigantic user base and audience, and its widespread brand recognition. In a press release announcing the sale, Verizon used similar language. “The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and C.E.O., said.

On his blog, the venture capitalist Fred Wilson suggested that this goal might be optimistic. “These are not growth businesses, they are mature businesses. So it is time to extract profits, not revenue growth, and run them appropriately for what they are,” he wrote. Yahoo says that it has a billion monthly active users, six hundred million of whom use its mobile service each month. Those numbers come from the company’s internal metrics, though, so I take them with a bucket of salt. If its user base were that large and active, Yahoo’s revenues wouldn’t have been shrinking—from $4.7 billion in 2013 to a projected $3.6 billion in 2016, according to estimates from Macquarie Securities. Its net display-advertising revenues, meanwhile, have been flat, hovering at around $1.7 billion since 2013, while its net search revenues are down, from $1.7 billion in 2013 to an estimated $1.2 billion in 2016.

It has been a long, long fall for Yahoo. Many of us have fond memories of the company and its emergence, in the nineteen-nineties, as a directory for the Internet. I even remember submitting, to what was then a baby Yahoo, the details of an early Web site I had put together. I became seriously addicted to the portal’s Site of the Day feature, which let me find marvellous wonders on what was still a very tiny Web. Over time, the directory grew, eventually evolving into a search engine. (The directory persevered until New Year’s Eve, 2014.) Yahoo began adding new services: e-mail; a personalized start page, MyYahoo; financial news; stock quotes; message boards. It gained millions of dial-up users and kept them coming back, as its stock-market value rose accordingly.

But Yahoo failed to adapt to the emergence of broadband and the attendant Cambrian explosion of Web pages, which made directories and their troves of hyperlinks suboptimal, compared with simple keyword searches. Google indexed the Internet nearly in real time. Yahoo tried to improve its search capabilities, for instance by buying companies like Inktomi, but in the end it relied on its hybrid of media, technology, and services, with the emphasis on media. Its sheer size kept it solvent, as advertisers poured in money for banner advertising on a large scale. Google’s nimbleness, though, made it the preferred tool for the Web 2.0 era, and its other services grew as Yahoo fell further behind. The rise of the social Internet, of Facebook and Twitter, accelerated the decline. I am not sure the Snapchat generation even knows what Yahoo is.

The company’s most recent missed opportunity was the rise of the mobile Web. Its failure to gain traction on smartphones can be traced, in part, to a bungled C.E.O.-hiring process, which led to the brief tenure, in early 2012, of Scott Thompson, who was found to have falsified his credentials. As Vauhini Vara wrote for this site last year, Yahoo had, at the time, a very popular messaging app, but it was coming from very far behind, and was unable to parlay this advantage into meaningful mobile growth. Today, its other apps, like Yahoo Weather, have fewer than five million monthly active users, while its search and news apps are hovering around just over a million monthly active users. If they were startups, they would have been shut down a long time ago.

Mayer, who took over in July, 2012, made some big bets, such as buying Tumblr for a billion dollars, in an attempt to gain a toehold among younger Internet users. She also tried to attract talent with smaller acquisitions, while trying to fend off activist investors who wanted the company to cash out its lucrative investments in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (which were not part of the Verizon sale). But the writing had long since been on the wall.

Yahoo is a perfect illustration of how large Internet companies die—by fading into irrelevance. A healthy Internet service possesses three qualities: it encourages habit formation; it appeals to a younger demographic, which can age alongside it; and it displays evidence of growth. Yahoo once had all of these qualities; now it has none. These days, despite my early affinity for the company, I don’t use any Yahoo products except for its fantasy-baseball pages—and those only because my fellow stat nerds won’t switch to ESPN. Every time I log in, I am reminded of the company’s mediocrity.

 

ANd MUCH more at the link above

[Tukaram (Tim)]

45 minutes ago, Dave Hounddriver said:

Here's an interesting article from an author who seems to think Yahoo has already had its day:

Good article... I really can't believe Verizon paid so much for it... I mean Yahoo?  GeoCities is next?

[Happyhorn52]

People tend to use Google when searching for items to purchase. Yahoo, Facebook and most of the others bombard you with adds for items based on your friends likes and your previous searches. In my opinion they are a nuisance although sellers have yet to discover this fact. 

For example if I google Jimmy Buffet Margarita maker I will be followed around for a week or two with adds for Margarita Makers.

https://www.google.com/#q=jimmy+buffet+margarita+maker

 

[robert k]

17 minutes ago, Happyhorn52 said:

People tend to use Google when searching for items to purchase. Yahoo, Facebook and most of the others bombard you with adds for items based on your friends likes and your previous searches. In my opinion they are a nuisance although sellers have yet to discover this fact. 

For example if I google Jimmy Buffet Margarita maker I will be followed around for a week or two with adds for Margarita Makers.

https://www.google.com/#q=jimmy+buffet+margarita+maker

 

You say that like it's a bad thing?

[mogo51]

Yes and enjoy your posts Tim, how are things there?

[Happyhorn52]

In the beginning Facebook was a great platform for keeping track of old friends. Now the adds are so annoying that I hate to log on.