Verizon will announce on Monday that they have reached an agreement to purchase Yahoo for $4.8 billion according to sources. The purchase will include Yahoo’s core internet operations as well as real estate and land holdings. The announcement will be made prior to the New York stock markets opening this morning.
Yahoo, worth $125 billion in 2000, was founded in 1994 and was once the internet’s premier search engine company. Yahoo was one of the last independently operated pioneers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking companies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom.
Yahoo grew from a directory of websites but grew and added services such as email, shopping, news, and more. All of the services were advertiser supported and free to users.
But in the end, Google and Facebook did Yahoo in by constantly reinventing their companies. these competitors became huge by adding services, buying smaller, up and coming social networks and function companies and leaving Yahoo in the dust. It’s ironic that Yahoo flirted with buying each of these companies when they were much smaller.
Marissa Mayer, who was hired as Yahoo’s chief executive four years ago but failed to turn around the company, is not expected to stay after the deal closes. But she is due to receive severance worth about $57 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm. All told, she will have received cash and stock compensation worth about $218 million during her time at Yahoo, according to Equilar’s calculations.
