Verizon buying Yahoo I can't recall any prior discussion on the...

Verizon buying Yahoo

I can't recall any prior discussion on the above, so apologies if it has occurred more recently. Here is an extract from an article that demonstrates why this topic is important, even if requiring a bit of dot joining.

(Non italics, bold, and underlined are mine)

'So why would Verizon continue to pursue the Yahoo deal despite the risks? (Security breaches). According to Entner, the initial $4.8 billion price tag “is still just pocket change” to the wireless provider. By comparison, Verizon spent roughly $11 billion building out its cellular network last year. If $4.8 billion is already a drop in the bucket, then Verizon probably doesn't much care whether it gets a $2 million discount or a $2 billion discount.

The key thing for Verizon is that it gets to control Yahoo's beleaguered (but still massive) core properties, which include Tumblr, Flickr and a whole lot of news and fantasy sports sites. Verizon expects to sell advertising to the millions of people who visit those sites every month (or to the advertisement content providers) — and to gather up all the behavioral data they generate.

“They want Yahoo users so they can market to them,” said Jeff Kagan, an independent technology analyst. In the United States, digital ad spending has become an even bigger business than TV ad spending, according to eMarketer, and it's only going to grow. By 2020, the research firm says, $113 billion will be spent on U.S. digital ads.

Verizon wants a slice of that revenue. And with many on Wall Street and in Washington expecting the Trump administration to roll back its privacy rules for Internet providers — which prohibit some forms of data sharing — Verizon could soon find more ways to make money off Yahoo users (content providers are also users). This isn't just good news for Verizon. It also benefits Yahoo by making its future look more promising.

“We continue to be very excited to join forces with Verizon and AOL,” Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said in a statement Tuesday. Mayer said that she still expects the deal to close in the second quarter."

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-epic-security-breach/?utm_term=.9ff66b8a33a8