Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion

U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon sold Yahoo and AOL to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion to focus on its 5G wireless business by divesting media assets also sold is its advertising technology business, Verizon will retain a tenth of the entire business.

Verizon acquired AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 and Yahoo for $4.5 billion in 2017. The media assets it acquired were reduced by more than $4 billion.

Image: Yahoo

AOL is also known as “America Online”, the early name used was “America Online”, and it was one of the pioneers of the Internet in the 1990s. The history of America Online can be traced back to the online service PlayNET in the 1980s. America Online initially provided dial-up services to millions of Americans. In 1998, it acquired CompuServe and ICQ, as well as Netscape. In 2001, America Online reached its peak in popularity and the company merged with Time Warner, the largest merger in American history. However, after that, the popularity of America Online declined. In 2009, AOL was spun off from Time Warner and the logo was changed to AOL. Verizon completed the acquisition of AOL in 2015.

Yahoo originally founded in January 1994 by two graduate students of Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang. The name at the time was “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, and it was renamed “Yahoo!” in March 1994. Yahoo once became a popular Internet portal. However, since the 2000s, Yahoo’s popularity began to be separated by Google and Facebook. Now, like AOL, it has become the “living fossil” of the Internet.

Via: CNBC