Verizon Buys Yahoo and Forms New Company
Verizon recently began broadcasting to their Twitter audience that the new brand name of the Yahoo properties that they purchased would become known as ‘The Oath’.
Several media firms then had a good time roasting the new name in a way that gave it a proper launch. The Times quoted a Twitter user’s ‘Oof’ comment prominently, while other newspapers were equally unsure just ‘how’ well the new name resonated when first heard.
What is the deal for Yahoo?
The new name is Verizon’s digital division’s rebranding of the Yahoo internet properties that were purchased by Verizon and will be paid for by June of this year. The selling price was $4.48 billion dollars and included The Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, AOL, and Yahoo. Yahoo will retain several of its other properties and forge ahead with the company name Altaba- likely chosen to reflect its stock holdings in the Chinese company, Alibaba.
How will the Oath operate?
Although owned by Verizon, the Oath will have its own management and manage all the brands that are currently owned by Yahoo. So if you enjoy reading the Huffington Post or Tech Crunch or Yahoo Sports, you will be able to continue to do so at the same websites using the same brand names. On the other hand, their mothership will now become ‘The Oath’.
What type of impact will the change bring?
For this answer, you will have to go back to the late 1990’s. AOL purchased part of Netscape and it was considered the end of the world for many Netscape workers. In truth, AOL did little to change anything but the branding that the browser was produced under. So people that were looking for instruction that came from a very different direction didn’t end up seeing that.
You can expect that Verizon’s handling of its brands will likely be similar. They will not rebrand their main brands like Yahoo and Huffington Post. It looks like they also intend to respect the culture that has developed at each digital brand unless there is a problem with the bottom line. Overall, the deal adds content to the portfolio of one of the largest phone carriers in the world, giving its existing clients access to a richer user experience than some of Verizon’s competitors will be able to do. As Oath will also be focused on bringing in new clients to add to its close to 1 billion readers and subscribers, it should also create a multimedia giant that has the power to continue to make its own rules.
And although Verizon has a plan to retain many of the workers that design and work for the business units that they are acquiring, the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, will be moving on to other challenges.
