Verizon recently announced that they would be selling Yahoo! and AOL to a private equity firm for about half the amount they bought the two properties for.
And so the Yahoo saga continues — and with this news, we have almost come full circle.
If you are looking for more details about the history of this situation, you can find that here. For now, here’s a quick timeline of events:
- The early 2000s: Yahoo! is the king of the search engines
- 2003: Yahoo! buys Overture to strengthen its pay-per-click (PPC) arm
- 2009: Yahoo! and Microsoft partner on search results
- 2015: Yahoo!/Microsoft partnership is renegotiated, and search results offerings split
- 2017: Yahoo! is bought by Verizon, combined with AOL, and rebranded as Oath
- 2019: Oath is rebranded as Verizon Media
- 2021: Verizon sells off Verizon Media to Apollo Global Management
So, where does that leave us now? Back where we started — at least from a name standpoint — as Apollo said they would rebrand under the name Yahoo (no exclamation point).
What we don’t know is how Apollo will develop the digital media arm of the company. Verizon Media is still viable — total Verizon Media revenue was up 10.4% for Q1 comparing year over year, with revenues of $1.9 billion. The hope is that they will invest and make the platform easier to use. In my opinion, this investment would lead to more people being likely to test out the platform’s PPC results.
I’ve seen many platform shifts since I began managing Yahoo! Ads in the early 2000s, and the latest UI version hasn’t changed substantially in years. From a management standpoint, the platform is challenging to manage, optimize, and pull reports from. We see good results for clients, so it’s a valuable platform, but it’s inefficient, and we rely heavily on our agency account team for assistance.
It will be interesting to see what changes, if any, are coming and what this next chapter in the ever-evolving Yahoo saga brings.
