With the wireless industry maturing, Verizon has been buying up internet and advertising technology companies, including AOL, and presenting itself as the best bet to take on Google and Facebook Inc. in mobile advertising. Yahoo has millions of users, a collection of websites including Flickr, Tumblr and Yahoo Finance and Sports and some useful digital-ad tech like Flurry and BrightRoll. Together with AOL, the new Yahoo under Verizon may have a better chance of competing in a digital ad market dominated by two big players.
It’s interesting to me that all of the companies Yahoo bought basically disappeared from consumer consciousness after the purchase. I’m not sure if Verizon can raise the profile of those companies or not, but it will be interesting to watch this play out.
Heading towards EvilCorp, one M&A at a time.
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The Flickr angle really depresses me. I’m a very long time Flickr user and if Verizon kills it I’ll be incredibly mad. I wish Stewart and Katarina would just buy it back and get it up and going again…
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’ll be done with malice. Apart from its user base, I doubt Flickr is high on Verizon’s list of reasons for buying Yahoo; they simply don’t have the culture to run anything as useful and relatively clean as Flickr without somehow remaking it in their own cluttered, barely-functional image.
Remember the Danger Hiptop/Sidekick phone? Now there was something that was popular enough for, say, Microsoft to want for its own, but several passes through Redmond’s stack-ranked fun-factory later, it had become a useless joke.
Agreed. And this is my worry for Flickr. I may be wrong, but Verizon is less “hip” to what Flickr is or maybe was than Yahoo and while Yahoo didn’t kill it, they certainly maimed it.
I find it about as useful as it was before, which is to say I’ve only posted to it relatively few times. But I like knowing it’s there, especially considering the cost of, say, Smugmug.
In the early days, before the Yahoo buy it was an amazing place, very upbeat and friendly and hip at the same time, long before any other social network was around. Yahoo attempted to continue the hipness but they just weren’t hip and they killed the UI which killed the UX. And, they missed mobile at the same time that Facebook was being born…
But, it’s still a useful service and if Verizon doesn’t kill it I’ll stick with it.