Does it ad up?
The telecoms giant has made a bold, risky bet on the future of advertising
“POETIC” is how Marissa Mayer, the boss of Yahoo (pictured), described the sale. Others, remembering better times at Yahoo, see little that is artful about the decline and fall of the 22-year-old internet company. On July 25th, Verizon, a telecoms giant that is also America’s biggest mobile operator, announced it would buy Yahoo’s main internet business for $4.8 billion (a price that does not include the firm’s properties in Asia or its portfolio of patents). The sum is paltry compared with Microsoft’s offer of $45 billion in 2008, which Yahoo’s management turned down, arguing that the firm was worth far more.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Does it ad up?”
From the July 30th 2016 edition
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