Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm for $5B

https://www.axios.com/verizon-yahoo-aol-apollo-03505214-29e7-4f73-9e77-3d778233ecad.html

by lando2319 • 5 years ago

33 6 5 years ago

What is unclear: Who will manage all those verizon.net email addresses, that are handled by AOL now?

Presently, external servers are pop.verizon.net, smtp.verizon.net and imap.aol.com.

For Frontier customers w/ verizon.net accts, if you don't log into the mail.aol.com portal quarterly, you get locked out of pop access. That's just one bump on what's been a long, rough road for them.

apozem• 5 years ago

Woof. Getting thrown to private equity vultures is an ignominious fate for two foundational Internet companies. But they do few useful things any more, so now they’ll be picked clean.

bluedino• 5 years ago

I recently was locked out of my Netscape email address, which was controlled by AOL. I replaced my phone, and unsuccessfully tried logging in a few times.

I called the support number, and was told they could reset my password, as I never set up a two factor device, and the recovery email I had setup was a Hotmail address that I hadn’t used in 20 years so it was no longer around.

The catch? I was using a free account, so for support I either had to pay the $24.95/year to upgrade to a paid account, or pay $7.95 for a one-time support cost.

Not a bad business model when you have 175 million users.

iamjohnsears• 5 years ago

Curious what happens with Yahoo fantasy sports. They have been investing in new features this year for the first time in what seems like a decade. Still have millions of active users.

dvt• 5 years ago

Still blows my mind how squandered AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Answers, etc. were. I get it, Google won search. But these were absolute staples of social interaction barely over a decade ago and should have really been what FB/Twitter/Instagram is today.

If anything, this is really encouraging -- truly anyone and anything can disrupt a monolithic incumbent. The next FB is probably being built by someone on HN right now :)

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

As far as PE goes, Apollo doesn’t seem the worst. They are primarily in funding pensions. That may mean low investment in new products from AOL and Yahoo, but they’re not going to go and part out either company.

Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm for $5B

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