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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:45PM (1 child)
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
these goofy fucks always make excuses for the status quo.