It was reported as recent as last week that Verizon was able to knock about $250 million off of the price of Yahoo. Now Verizon has confirmed that they have amended their agreement with Yahoo, to be $350 million less than the original price they had agreed to pay for the company, bringing the final amount to $4.48 billion in cash. Verizon and Yahoo will also share responsibility for any further legal action in regards to the hacks that had been made public recently, with Yahoo. Verizon expects the deal to close in the second quarter of 2017
Verizon had been seeking to either lower the cost of Yahoo or get out of the deal entirely, after a couple of pretty major hacks had surfaced about Yahoo. A few years ago, millions of users had their passwords stolen and accounts hacked. It was something that Yahoo never made public, until after Verizon decided to buy them. Which led to a number of users leaving their services for the competition, and thus made the original amount that Verizon had agreed on, seem unfair. Verizon did still want Yahoo, but not so much for their users, but for their advertising. While Google is definitely the leader in advertising right now, Yahoo and AOL aren’t far behind, and combining those two would mean big advertising bucks for Verizon, which they can put into their Go90 video service.
Similar to AT&T, Verizon has been looking for ways to continue to grow their business. With wireless maturing in the past few years, there’s not a whole lot of growth to be made in wireless right now. Which has led the two biggest carriers to look elsewhere. AT&T bought DIRECTV and is in the process of buying Time Warner, to extend their video services, while Verizon has bought AOL and are buying Yahoo, to extend their video and advertising business. Meanwhile, Sprint and T-Mobile are staying competitive in wireless, and forced Verizon and AT&T to bring back unlimited data in some form. This of course isn’t going to help Verizon and AT&T grow, but it is making the market more competitive, which is great for customers.