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Verizon. Yahoo! AOL. Oath:
Tim Armstrong, the head of Verizon's AOL division, announced Oath in a Twitter post on Monday afternoon: "Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017."
The brand will apply to the digital media division of Verizon after it buys Yahoo's internet assets for $4.48 billion, a deal that is expected to close by the end of June. But do not count the legacy brands out just yet: Yahoo, AOL and The Huffington Post will continue to exist and operate with their own names — under the Oath umbrella.
[...] Many greeted the announcement with bewilderment, with some suggesting that Oath sounded like the name of a heavy metal band.
Also at Yahoo News (AFP) and Ars Technica.
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Verizon to House Yahoo! and AOL Under "Oath" Brand
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(Score: 2) by fadrian on Tuesday April 04 2017, @08:45PM (9 children)
Who are these Yahoo! and AOL of which you speak? Do they have significance? How do they even still exist? Are they selling AARP memberships and funeral insurance on their websites? Are they anything more than hollow registration shells with a few market undesirables for customers? Or are they just a couple of empty brands to be tossed on the marketing bonfire of rebranding as a last ditch effort to coax some mileage out of a couple of dead nags? Have I butchered enough metaphors to make it clear what a tragicomic outcome this is? And quite the demonstration that, even in bidness, all things (well, except maybe GE) have their time...
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:03PM (8 children)
How do they even still exist?
Advertising. They own the 2nd and 3rd largest advert networks. They also still have a decent amount of cash rolling in from dialup. There are millions of people still stuck on dialup or paying for something they do not need.
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:29PM (6 children)
That's why they're invisible in the market as far as consumers are concerned. Advertising is somewhat like dark matter. You would think a market couldn't work, that a corporation couldn't survive, and would eventually fail. Enter the dark money from advertising that all of the sudden makes a site profitable.
The Huffington Post is new and an online newspaper, so it would be the exception with high consumer visibility.
However, AOL has not been relevant for over 10 years. It mainly branded itself into consumers minds as the people that provided literal mountains of shiny CDs and a shitty business model based on minutes of usage. I understand there were some communities there, but so inept WRT computing and the Internet that they literally thought AOL was the Internet. That's long since past its time and I think it may have actually been the fucking late 90's when AOL became irrelevant at least as far as connecting to the Internet was concerned. I remember they had their own app for a time that ran across broadband connections until most of those fools figured out that broadband *was* the Internet too. Close to 20 years of not being relevant.
Yahoo! .... well they lost relevance quite some time ago too. They had some gaming communities, but beyond that, Yahoo! is a third rate search engine and low quality email provider used for throwaway shells (or so I thought). Seriously, why did anybody really give two shits about Yahoo! at any point in time?
In the minds of the consumers AOL and Yahoo! are long gone.... yet they persisted. That's the only way something like that could be worth billions while providing nothing that is hot in the minds of consumers; The true consumers of AOL and Yahoo! were advertising parasites and they still have money while circling the drain. If AOL and Yahoo! truly advertise themselves anywhere, it would be trade publications for marketing. Although, Yahoo! sunk quite a bit of its cash into Alibaba, IIRC. That investment is still paying off and keeping them alive, but not relevant with their brand.
Yahoo! email is interesting too. They don't just provide email services to end users, but handle entire networks for larger customers. No shit, AT&T has all of its email handled (quite poorly) by Yahoo!. If you call AT&T and bitch about your email eventually getting to a L2/L3 they will inform you that AT&T doesn't really have control over its email anymore and that Yahoo! handles it.
If you have a sbcglobal.net or att.com email address, then you are receiving the excellent systems administration work of Yahoo! admins who could not sysadmin' on a Speak N' Spell much less email platforms.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)
I can't help but think that the online advertising market is going to collapse, hitting Google the hardest.
You may have seen the troubles YouTube has faced in recent days with advertising and offensive content. That's nothing compared to what could happen if advertisers find that the ads they buy are widely ignored and don't lead to much sales or awareness. For all the detailed stats Google/Doubleclick can offer to advertisers, fake clicks or views [theguardian.com] have been found to be an issue before. And Adblock-type apps or extensions are within the ability of many users to install. Grandparents might be an exception... unless their grandkids do it for them. It certainly would cut down on the amount of viruses they get hit by.
Google has been blessed with a pile of easy money which it continues to accumulate. Sure, they have to do some work to improve the AdSense/AdWords platform, or emergency PR to stop brand boycotts. But they have made many billions with which they can worm their way into more substantial pursuits, like cloud computing as a service, driverless cars, hardware sales, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @10:19PM
That's nothing compared to what could happen if advertisers find that the ads they buy are widely ignored and don't lead to much sales or awareness.
None of that stopped advertising from becoming big business before the internet.
In the ad biz a 5% response rate is consider a massive, unqualified success. If it turns out that internet advertising isn't quite so effective as it was hyped to be, that won't make much difference. Response rates were already so low before the net that even a minor improvement is still worth big money.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 05 2017, @12:49AM
What is the alternative for advertisers?
The local newspaper ads? billboards? I suspect even if online ads are crap. It still beats mass broadcasts of ads with poor hit ratio.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:37AM
I sat in on those meetings where they announced the buyouts to the Verizon minions. They bought AOL and eventually Yahoo for their advert platforms. The rest will be gone or spun out in 5 years. They usually leave their buyouts sit for 2-3 years before they turn them into normalized vz goo. Anything not making a significant profit or 'core' will be spun out. Anything making negative profit will be nuked from orbit.
AOL dial up is prob 50 million net a year. Not amazing money but nice for their setup.
The desktop market is nonexistant for them for adverts. But even at 2/3/4 the money is nothing to sneeze at. It is not google money but it is significant to to their bottom line. They want to position themselves as 'the' mobile advert platform. They are in a good position to pull that off as they own one of the biggest wireless carriers too. I do not see google letting them do it without a fight.
I also would not be surprised there are 2-3 other internal platforms popping up from inside VZ to compete with the acquisitions. They will be even crappier than the ones they bought. They will kill the acquisitions in favor of those. It is the VZ way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:48AM
Back in the late 90s or early 2000s my ISP was bought out by that bunch of Yahoos. I immediately changed to a competing ISP. I did not want to be a yahoo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by butthurt on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:06AM
> If you have a sbcglobal.net or att.com email address [...]
I wonder how comfortable the people at AT&T are about outsourcing their e-mail to Verizon.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:54PM
They own the 2nd and 3rd largest advert networks.
Given the google domination, thats sort of like being the 3rd largest OS at the turn of the century, that would probably have been minix.
I have no idea if money is changing hands but I was stunned to discover one of my wifes relatives had an AOL email address. Like imagine if someone gave you their compuserve login which was a very long series of digits. Or here's my fidomail address.