Last year, Verizon had announced that they were going to purchase Yahoo for a cool $4.8 billion. However, in the time since the deal was announced, Yahoo has suffered a few major hacks have been uncovered, like a billion accounts being hacked a few years ago. This led to Verizon rethinking whether they should continue with this purchase of Yahoo. After all, Verizon isn’t purchasing the company for their users, but for their ad and video businesses. However, users were a big reason why the price was so high. Now, according to a report out of Bloomberg, it appears that Verizon has been able to lower the cost by about $250 million. The new price is expected to be released fairly soon. Since the news hit, Yahoo’s shares have started surging a bit, signaling that shareholders are happy with this news.
Verizon has been after ad companies lately, and buying them up. That included AOL, which has become an integral part of Go90, their OTT video service. They purchased AOL for their vast video content (they also own a few publications like Engadget, TechCrunch and The Huffington Post), which gives them some exclusive video content for their Go90 service. They were also interested in their ad technology. Since Go90 is not a paid service, it’s ad-supported, these ad technologies are very important and it’s a big reason why they were looking to pick up Yahoo as well. Yahoo and AOL of course aren’t as big of an ad company as Google is, but they are a pretty good competitor, especially when you combine the two, which is what Verizon is looking to do.
We could see Yahoo and Verizon announce the new price for this deal any day now. Which should put it down to around $4.5 billion, that is still a pretty big number for a company that hasn’t really been all that popular since around 2010. With most people not using their Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger or any other Yahoo account in nearly a decade now. Verizon may also be looking to lower the amount a bit more, especially since Yahoo has lost quite a few users since these hacks surfaced.