Verizon and Yahoo may be close to making their deal at $250 million lessafter hacking numbers prompt renegotiation. The earliest announced asked-for price by Yahoo was reported at $4.8 billion, per MarketingLand.com but Verizon flinched on the buyout when news of two major hacking events came to light. Now, Verizon is looking for a discounted price.
Yahoo was put up for sale after disgruntled stockholders decided that CEO Marissa Mayer was not getting good results on the Yahoo bottom line. Mayer stated she wants to work with Verizon after the deal is finished. The buyout is expected to be completed during the first quarter of 2017.
In spite of Yahoo’s troubles, it is still the number three online platform in terms of unique viewers, just behind Google and Facebook, according to recent comScore data, and just ahead of Microsoft and Amazon.
In 2013, more than one billion accounts around the world were affected in the first hacking event, and 500 million in the second event in the following year. Verizon wanted to renegotiate their buying price to the tune of a $1 billion discount, but Yahoo’s people believed this would not be acceptable to the company’s stock owners.
Yahoo officers emphasized in a release their earlier influence over the internet about two decades ago: “Yahoo is a company that changed the world. Before Yahoo, the Internet was a government research project. Yahoo humanized and popularized the web, email, search, real-time media, and more.”
