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posted by takyon on Friday December 14 2018, @08:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-like-prayer dept.

In news that nobody could have foreseen and will be a shock to everyone:

Verizon signals its Yahoo and AOL divisions are almost worthless

The on-paper assessment represents a realization that Verizon's online ad strategy, called Oath, is a bust.

Only a year and a half after it built Oath from the assets of the communications giants Yahoo and AOL, Verizon now says they're virtually worthless. In a filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, Verizon Communications Inc. said it was taking a $4.6 billion charge on the goodwill balance of Oath, the division it created in June 2017 after it spent billions of dollars to buy Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc.

[...] Oath was supposed to be Verizon's big push into web-driven advertising, a bid to compete with behemoths like Google LLC and Facebook Inc. in the U.S. online ad market, which the Internet Advertising Bureau projects could top $100 billion this year. But rather than eat into Google's and Facebook's market shares, Oath's ad revenue fell by 7 percent in the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, to just $1.8 billion.

Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., by comparison, hoovered up $29 billion in ad revenue in the same three months, a rise of more than 10 percent over the previous quarter. [...] Meanwhile, the growth of another player, Amazon Advertising — which outpaced Oath with $2.5 billion in ad sales in the third quarter — has pushed Oath even lower down the food chain.

[...] Writing off 96 percent of its value is like "ripping off the Oath band-aid," Fritzsche wrote. [...] Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015, and it bought Yahoo for $4.5 billion in 2017. It then merged them into a new venture called Oath.

Who could possibly have imagined that with big names like AOL and Yahoo! this venture wouldn't compete well against the mere likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Verizon cuts 10,000 jobs and admits its Yahoo/AOL division is a failure

Verizon's Oath division failing in ad market, and it could get even worse.

Related: Verizon Takes Aim at Tumblr's Kneecaps, Bans All Adult Content


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

Related Stories

Verizon Takes Aim at Tumblr’s Kneecaps, Bans All Adult Content 40 comments

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Verizon takes aim at Tumblr's kneecaps, bans all adult content

Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that owns the Yahoo and AOL digital media brands, has announced that as of December 17, all adult content will be banned from the Tumblr blogging site. Any still or moving images displaying real-life human genitals or female nipples and any content—even drawn or computer-generated artwork—depicting any sexual acts will be prohibited.

Genitals and female nipples will only be permitted within the context of breastfeeding, childbirth, and in health-related subjects such as gender confirmation surgery. Written erotica will also remain on the site.

Nowadays, pornography represents a substantial element of Tumblr's content. A 2013 estimate said that around 11 percent of the site's 200,000 most-visited domains were porn, and some 22 percent of inbound links were from adult sites.


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @08:56PM (#774554)

    Who knew that $19 billion for WhatsApp would be a great deal???

    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:15AM

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:15AM (#774682) Journal

      Is it a bad idea? How much tax do they avoid over this little endeavor [youtube.com]? Besides, maybe they had to spend the money, quickly...

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday December 14 2018, @09:11PM (23 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 14 2018, @09:11PM (#774559)

    The Verizon business model for decades has been "buy company, fire everyone, repeat". Its a weird business model, but it seems to work for them, so ....

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 14 2018, @09:26PM (21 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 14 2018, @09:26PM (#774562)

      They can cover their losses with the profits from their massively overpriced phone service which is supposedly their reason to exist. It's really handy that their big competitors are also massively overpriced with their phone services. Aren't oligopolies fun?

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @09:58PM (15 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @09:58PM (#774569)

        You think these oligarchs arose from voluntary trade? Think again.

        Their power derives from Uncle Sam and his minions; it drives from their steel tipped boots being pressed ever harder onto your fleshy parts.

        You rail against Big Business and monopolies, but that's exactly what governments are; in fact, they are worse—they are bad, violent businesses that won't go bankrupt, because they can just declare their income at the point of a gun. Indeed, the worse they perform, the more likely they are to decree a salary rise; how can you ignore such a perversion of resource allocation?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @10:38PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @10:38PM (#774582)

          VIM ???

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @11:00PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @11:00PM (#774590)

            Violently Imposed Monopoly. A SoylentNews meme.

            • (Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday December 14 2018, @11:42PM

              by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 14 2018, @11:42PM (#774603)

              And of course, the main alternative to VIM is Egregious Management Always Creating Stupidity, or EMACS for short.

              --
              The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:44AM

              by driverless (4770) on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:44AM (#774625)

              As opposed to vbl0175, a SoylentNews mime. You don't hear from him much.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 14 2018, @10:47PM (8 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday December 14 2018, @10:47PM (#774585) Journal

          Hello again Mr. Vim. Daily reminder than sufficient centralization of power and resources destroys the line between government and business, and until you can point us to a foolproof contract-enforcement solution, we will always need government. Eat your liver.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday December 14 2018, @10:58PM

            by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 14 2018, @10:58PM (#774589)

            Quite. I'm often drawn to a lot of the small government rhetoric. But so long as capitalism is the economic law of the land, so that wealth (and thus power) perpetually concentrate, we need a centralized institution more powerful than any corporation or 0.0001%er to keep their abuses in check. I'd love to see that embraced as a primary purpose of government, along with the then-obviously-necessary safeguards to keep the already-powerful from getting any more voice in it than any other citizen.

          • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday December 14 2018, @11:22PM (4 children)

            by Virindi (3484) on Friday December 14 2018, @11:22PM (#774597)

            Shocker: someone is always going to have the guns and thus the power to compel others to their will. And it doesn't actually matter what you call such a system. Rather, what matters is how much control the common man has over that power.

            Humans who desire to rule others have come up with many tricks and philosophies to dilute the power the populous has over them, with predictable results. People who think that merely changing the supposed structure will solve this problem have fallen into the trap. Divide and conquer. It is a tale as old as human history and it seems crazy that people have yet to recognize it.

            • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:27AM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:27AM (#774621)

              As you imply, the key to avoiding Tyranny is competition.

              After all, there has never been One World Government; there has always been anarchy at the level of the nation state, and the violence has diminished as the interaction between nation-states has approached Capitalism.

              Surely you recognize the value of the Separation of Powers (e.g., 3 separate but equal branches of government); well, taken to the limit, there is no more robust separation of powers than competition in a capitalistic market. Who shall enforce the capitalism? Well, such enforcement is itself a service, and should therefore also be subject to the same idea competition.

              This is not an infinite regression; such recursion may be implemented as iteration.

              • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:47AM (2 children)

                by Virindi (3484) on Saturday December 15 2018, @12:47AM (#774626)

                "Amount of control the population has over the forces controlling them" is not a linear or even constantly increasing function of government size. That control is low for large governments, sure, but it is also low when there is very little government (as in left-anarchy or anarcho-capitalism). The problem of human power is not so easily solved...if only it were, that would sure be great!

                The reason here is that there are actually two separate mechanisms.

                At the large-government end, the line between government and industry blends and competition is restrained.

                At the almost-no-government end, there are insufficient rules to enforce a competitive marketplace. So instead of competing on merits, companies would compete on coercion. In a system of private enforcement without government oversight, the incentive is for the enforcement companies to collude to screw over the population (just like with big government...).

                So if both extremes are bad, how can this be solved? Well, it should be pretty obvious that the goal should be to create a system of oversight that is least able to be manipulated by power-seekers, and which has the explicit goal of forcing maximal competition.

                It is true that the best ultimate check on such a system is the population itself; power-seekers recognize this of course and do everything they can to quietly remove methods of the population controlling their government. For instance, witness the attacks by courts and legislatures against ballot-initiative processes. This is completely expected. What we need is a combination of stronger direct democracy, and a better understanding by the population of the threat of power seeking people. As long as the majority of the population is content to "leave the details to the experts" and substantiative decisions are insulated from recourse with massive "take it or leave it" bills, the administrative state, etc., nothing can improve and no oversight will be effective.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:45PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:45PM (#774758)

                  At the large-government end, the line between government and industry blends
                  At the almost-no-government end,... the incentive is for the enforcement companies to collude to screw over the population (just like with big government...).

                  Getting out of the failure mode ("government") means removing coercion (i.e., taxation); well, that's the [probably asymptotic] ideal.

                  Staying out of the failure mode is achieved by competition.

                  Competition is maintained by establishing self-reinforcing, "anti-fragile", decentralized protocols for interaction.

                  Good centralization is then just a local efficiency in the solution space, and when a centralization goes bad, then participants can fall back on the underlying decentralized protocols so as to abandon that bad centralization and then go about the business of finding a new centralization in the solution space.

                  Rather than propping up the existing failure mode, spend your time figuring out how to make this description actionable.

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:50PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:50PM (#774871)

                    these goofy fucks always make excuses for the status quo.

          • (Score: 3, Touché) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:10AM

            by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:10AM (#774680) Homepage Journal

            "Eat Your Liver"

            I'll return your favor with an insult of my very own:

            "For the government to enforce contract gives you that clean, fresh, restorative feeling of not being sodomized by a supersonic telephone pole."

            --
            Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:08PM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:08PM (#774881) Journal

            Ahhhh, liver. May I? Are there any fava beans? Here, I'll share my chianti. Such a pleasant picnic, I'm really enjoying myself!

        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:06AM (1 child)

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:06AM (#774677) Homepage Journal

          I voted for a local sales tax increase for $52,000,000 to build a Rapid Transit Corridor down one of Vancouver Washington's main drags. They just started building a second one.

          --
          Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:10PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @07:10PM (#774882)

            Main drags? I take it you have secondary drags? They don't dress as convincingly as main drags?

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 14 2018, @10:12PM (3 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 14 2018, @10:12PM (#774574)

        12 years ago, we switched from T-mobile to Verizon because we moved from a Metro area to the relative boonies and Verizon was the only provider with decent coverage near our house. They were raping us for $70+ per month per line for minimal data "feature phones" with lock-in contracts, etc. At the time, Verizon would not budge on pricing, we were already at their lowest cost option. Buying your phone with Verizon was basically throwing money away at this time.

        6 years ago we moved from the boonies to a Metro area and switched back to T-mobile with no-contract smartphones for ~$50/mo/line, and had pretty good service with them up to a point, but it wasn't the greatest at our house under the metal roof. Verizon started to budge around then and offer no-contract plans but was still more expensive then T-mo. I think the Nexus 5 phones cost about $300 to buy.

        3 years ago, we got fed up with marginal wifi calling capability under T-mo and switched to Google Fi. My wife's bill runs around $40 per month after taxes, and mine runs around $30 (difference in data consumption rates...) WiFi calling was noticeably better with Google Fi, I'm pretty happy with my Nexus 5x on Google Fi (replaced a Nexus 5 from T-mo that I smashed the screen on), but my wife has had two Nexus 5x phones die on her with the boot-loop issues, one just last week. The Nexus 5x phones cost about $200 to buy through Google Fi.

        Last week my wife's second Nexus 5x went boot loopy, Google Fi now offers a Moto something for $199 - and maybe a $100 service rebate, but, being fed up with Google Fi my wife went to Target and bought a $35 prepaid smartphone, more or less the same size and apparent performance of the Nexus 5x, lacks a fingerprint scanner and the camera is even worse than the 5x, but we have cameras for taking "real" pictures, the phone camera is perfectly adequate for camera snaps. Prepaid service with 5GB of data (she normally uses about 2.5GB with Google Fi) is costing a little less than $40 per month - service provided by: Verizon.

        Full circle from highest cost carrier to lowest cost option. We shall see how performance compares, I'm keeping my Google Fi phone for now, with my lower data usage the Google Fi bill comes out lower than the prepaid option. Of course, both services offer a discount if we "merge" our plans, but I think that discount would be more or less a wash with our differential service prices, and I prefer the diversity of having two different providers, if they both have decent coverage.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday December 14 2018, @10:47PM (2 children)

          by Gaaark (41) on Friday December 14 2018, @10:47PM (#774586) Journal

          This ^ is EXACTLY why you need competition, not mergers.

          With competition, you have to compete: compete on price, service; more competition, better prices and service.
          With mergers, you have "Fuck the customer, gimme mine!"

          --
          --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
          • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday December 14 2018, @11:31PM

            by Virindi (3484) on Friday December 14 2018, @11:31PM (#774601)

            I'm glad others seem to recognize the danger of the current Wall Street fueled buy/merge fest. Legislators of course love it.

            But what we really need is to stop this credit-driven march toward fewer players in every market. One idea is to prohibit companies from buying other companies with anything but cash. Or, prevent public companies from buying out any other company...one issue is that given the current stock market conditions, with huge amounts of excess cash being dumped in by the Fed in the last decade, public companies have an unfair funding advantage. One thing they do with that advantage is buy out the competition. In the long run of course that hurts everyone but the company...and citizens are paying to create that situation.

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:27AM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:27AM (#774683)

            Agreed about competition. I'm alternately disappointed and disgusted with how long it takes for competition to move the markets, but it eventually does move them. Meanwhile, players like AT&T and health insurers pull stunts like raising their rates while their competitors lower theirs, forcing customers to A) watch them, and B) switch providers in order to benefit.

            On the topic of health insurance, something about having a virtual gun to the customers' head does something screwy in the health insurance market - competition is just broken there, I believe much deeper regulation, perhaps even single payer, is the better answer, unless we all want to end up paying 50% of our life's earnings toward healthcare costs, which seems to be the trend we are on. Don't get me wrong, I've made a living from the medical device industry since 1991 and it just keeps growing - so fast that there aren't any outside opportunities that even come close to the income/benefits/security potential for me, but my personal income situation not withstanding, that shit's broken in a bad bad way.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:02AM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:02AM (#774675) Homepage Journal

        - value, so much so that I canceled Comcast at home.

        No contract, $70 per month, free 48 State voice, unlimited texts, uncapped no usage charge 4g.

        My only gripe is that HD videos work poorly through my iOS 10.0.1 iPhone 7 but likely that's a driver problem that Apple already fixed in iOS 12.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 14 2018, @09:58PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 14 2018, @09:58PM (#774570)

      Investment in unproven businesses is risky, sometimes you win, more often you lose. Verizon is playing in the deep end of the pool, using other people's money to make their bets. C'est la vie.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Friday December 14 2018, @09:38PM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Friday December 14 2018, @09:38PM (#774564) Homepage Journal

    And possibly it's very related. Tumblr. They're canceling the Adult section of Tumblr. Which is the biggest biggest part of it. And possibly they'll make Tumblr into a great place for kids. And that's going to be a lot of work. Taking a long time. Like Times Square -- otherwise known as the home of the Disney Store. We love Times Square, don't we? Great place to take the kids. But trust me, it wasn't always. Used to be a very grown-up place. But Mayor Giuliani worked very hard on that one, he made it so nice.

    And I think Tumblr will do very well with the kids. But everybody that comes for the Adult section, they won't be coming there anymore. They'll come somewhere. But not on Tumblr!!

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:55AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:55AM (#774650) Journal

      From what I hear, half of Tumblr will skedaddle immediately while the rest of it slowly fades away into oblivion. You have to give Verizon some credit; they sure know how to destroy something.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:56AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:56AM (#774672) Homepage Journal

    - Listings.

    It even charged that much just to edit them.

    I would have happily paid $20 but I know Yahoo!'s days were _already_ numbered when it started charging so much.

    I once wrote an essay that sang AltaVista's praises.

    Remember AltaVista? Of course you don't! See this grey in my beard? That's because I invented the Internet.

    AltaVista bit the dust when Google had no ads at first, then later clearly marking them. AltaVista was charging for unmarked paid placements in its hits.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:39AM (#774688)

      what about hotbot and metacrawler?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:41AM (#774694)

    I'm sure News is a small piece of the pie for both, but Google News is really going down the tubes. They could rename it Google Opinion. Yahoo's site, although ugly, seems like a better product.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @05:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @05:00PM (#774819)

    They are closing down competing sources for everything until only the Satan almighty remains. Supposedly unrelated companies doing the bidding for each other should be enough clue for anyone wanting to know who wants to be in control. It is the satanic khazar jewish rats. Expose them and their violent plots against us can then be dismantled, and all of them put on an isolated island, constantly watched until they all die off.

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