Verizon announced an agreement to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion on Monday, July 25. The agreement marks the end of an era for the company that once defined the Internet. (Reuters) 
 
 Two years ago — an epoch in Silicon Valley time — AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong proposed a merger to Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer. 
 
 Armstrong and Mayer are former Googlers hired to run and rescue these former marquee Internet destinations. But AOL and Yahoo were struggling in an increasingly mobile online world dominated by Google and Facebook. 
 
 Mayer rejected Armstrong's offer. 
 
 But now that AOL-Yahoo merger is set to take place in a wholly unexpected manner — thanks to Verizon, the largest U.S. phone carrier. On Monday, Verizon and Yahoo announced that the telecom giant agreed to buy the ailing Internet company in a $4.8 billion deal. Last year, Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion. 
 
 “Just over a year ago we acquired AOL to enhance our strategy of providing a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers. The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company,” said Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdam in a statement. 
 
 Verizon has always been considered to be one of the most likely suitors for Yahoo, which has been officially for sale since April, after several years of failed turnaround plans executed under Mayer. 
 
 With the deal, Tim Armstrong would in many ways be getting the merger he once wanted. 
 
 Tim Armstrong may finally be getting what he wanted. (Bloomberg News) 
 
 "Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers," Armstrong said in a statement. 
 
 Armstrong, who heads Verizon's AOL unit, is expected to be a key player. A reading of his tenure at AOL offers some insight into what the future may mean for Yahoo, which would probably turn into a more focused advertising company. 
 
 AOL is still heavily involved in media content, thanks to its ownership of the Huffington Post, but even with those businesses, it has kept a strong advertising focus. 
 
 Many admire Armstrong for sticking with AOL, said Eric Jackson of SpringOwl — a firm invested in Yahoo that has been very critical of Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo. 
 
 “​He could have quit a couple of years into it,” Jackson said. “Many people say to me they wouldn’t do business with AOL if it was anyone but Tim Armstrong.” 
 
 Landing Yahoo would also provide Verizon with a sizable cut of the U.S. online market. Yahoo and AOL might not be trendy names, but they ranked No. 3 and No. 6 respectively in ComScore’s list of the top digital media properties in the United States in February. 
 
 Add AOL and Yahoo together, and their unique visitors were 50 percent greater than No. 1 Google. 
 
 [What you need to know about Marissa Mayer's future] 
 
 Verizon’s desire for Yahoo spotlights the grand scale of its ambitions: Not happy with just providing access to content, it wants to own a fat chunk of the online-content industry. 
 
 Consumers are migrating from simple email and Web browsing on their smartphones to rich mobile video and online games. And these data-hog services represent a lucrative opportunity to sell ads and, in some cases, could be a source of subscription revenue. 
 
 Analysts say the sprawling nature of Yahoo's properties led its leadership astray. 
 
 "Yahoo has failed for the last 13 years to exploit as a unified whole what is actually an excellent set of parts," said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Yahoo hasn't been able to clearly define what it is and what value it provides." 
 
 Yahoo was a platform for content, and a failing one. 
 
 But Verizon apparently thinks that grabbing Yahoo’s content, combined with its strength in distribution, will allow Verizon to create better, more valuable ads, VanBoskirk said. 
 
 Verizon’s move first for AOL, and now Yahoo, signals how traditional telephone and Internet companies are worried that their businesses are being commodified. Cutthroat competition in recent years has prompted price wars. This pressure is what helped drive Comcast to snatch up NBCUniversal in 2011 and AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV in 2015. 
 
 Meanwhile, Internet providers such as Verizon face other pressures. 
 
 Federal data show that Americans are increasingly abandoning their home broadband connections in favor of mobile data connections. Analysts say the shift toward mobile partly explains why Verizon has been shedding some of its traditional wired operations in recent years. And it also provides insight into Verizon's pursuit of a proprietary mobile video platform Go90. 
 
 The nearly $5 billion bid for Yahoo highlights just how mightily the Internet company has struggled. After all, Yahoo's stock market valuation alone is $38 billion. But many investors think almost all of Yahoo’s value is tied up in shares it owns in the Chinese commerce site Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Those shares are not part of Verizon's deal. 
 
 The sale of Yahoo comes with access to Yahoo's news operation and Yahoo Finance, a website for investors keeping tabs on Wall Street. It includes Yahoo's popular destination for fantasy sports, and its question-and-answer platform, Yahoo Answers. Plus, Yahoo owns the microblogging site Tumblr and the photo-hosting site Flickr. 
 
 The deal may also face some potential land mines. 
 
 Activists and regulators in Washington are increasingly examining strict new privacy rules on Internet providers, according to Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at MoffettNathanson. 
 
 To turn content views into advertising dollars, Verizon wants to use and share the behavioral data it collects on its Internet subscribers — including records such as its customers' Web browsing and location history. 
 
 But under the plan being weighed by federal regulators, Internet providers would be required to get their customers' explicit permission before using that data for third-party advertising. 
 
 In other words, customers would need to opt in, explicitly agreeing that their data be used. 
 
 The industry has fought the proposed requirement from the Federal Communications Commission, saying it would make it harder to adapt to the future. 
 
 The rules would do more than that, Moffett said: It would also make it harder for Verizon to justify spending billions on a Web property it cannot efficiently monetize. 
 
 "Buying Yahoo would be very much going in the direction of buying a significant amount of ad inventory," Moffett said. "And while it's likely the case that a mobile operator could increase the value of that ad inventory by overlaying better user targeting based on wireless location data, the FCC privacy regime may blow up that strategy." 
 
 Verizon's swallowing up Yahoo, after already buying AOL, transforms the telecom “into a big data super-giant,” cautioned Jeff Chester, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy. 
 
 “Yahoo is not a primary threat,” Chester said. “But when you merge Yahoo with the ability of an ISP [Internet-service provider] to monitor everything someone does, that’s a threat.” 
 
 The deal is expected to close early next year. 
 
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 Save ||||| Verizon Communications has announced it is buying Yahoo’s core businesses for $4.83 billion—a steep price to pay for internet assets that are considered “worthless” by Wall Street. 
 
 
 
 The deal makes sense for Verizon, though. 
 
 As one of the largest US telecom carriers, Verizon faces market saturation and limited growth prospects in its traditional business. Its purchase of Yahoo, which follows its acquisition of AOL in May 2015, provides more evidence that it sees online content and advertising as a primary way to increase growth. 
 
 Under the deal, Verizon will get Yahoo’s online assets including search, mail, and instant messaging, along with its ad technology and various real estate holdings. The sale does not include Yahoo’s cash, nor its stakes in Alibaba Group Holdings and Yahoo Japan. These and a handful of other assets will stay with Yahoo, which plans to change its name when the Verizon transaction closes and will remain a publicly traded company. 
 
 For Verizon, the acquisition of Yahoo’s core internet assets puts the telecom giant “in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising,” Verizon chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam said in a press release announcing the transaction. 
 
 In the online advertising business, Verizon faces two main competitors: Google and Facebook. By meshing together various tools from AOL, Yahoo, and its own operations, Verizon might be able to mount a credible challenge to those two giants. Verizon already has AOL’s advertising technology—and Yahoo’s has been criticized—but Yahoo’s prowess in native advertising could prove useful, especially in the mobile space. Yahoo also could help Verizon improve in the search arena, where it lags. 
 
 Meanwhile, Yahoo will bring in hundreds of millions more viewers from sites like News, Sports, and Finance to complement Verizon’s popular properties like TechCrunch and Huffington Post. In the US, comScore puts Yahoo at No. 3 among digital properties. 
 
 “Yahoo and AOL popularized the Internet, email, search and real-time media,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in the joint announcement of the deal. “It’s poetic to be joining forces with AOL and Verizon as we enter our next chapter focused on achieving scale on mobile.” 
 
 Of course, even with the AOL and Yahoo assets, Verizon has a long way to go (paywall) to catch up with the online advertising leaders. Verizon with AOL currently holds a mere 1.8% of the $69 billion digital ad market in the US. Yahoo has about 3.4%. Google and Facebook together claim about half of it. Looked at another way, though, there’s plenty of market share to steal, which can’t be said of its traditional business. 
 
 This story was updated at 8:13am ET with information from Verizon and Yahoo’s official statement announcing the deal. ||||| Verizon has completed its acquisition of the operating business of Yahoo for $4.48 billion, which coupled with AOL creates what the telco boasts is a global digital-media powerhouse that reaches more than 1 billion consumers. 
 
 As expected, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is leaving the company with the deal’s closing. “Given the inherent changes to Marissa Mayer’s role with Yahoo resulting from the closing of the transaction, Mayer has chosen to resign from Yahoo,” the telco said in a statement. “Verizon wishes Mayer well in her future endeavors.” 
 
 The merged AOL-Yahoo organization will be called Oath, comprising more than 50 media and technology brands. Tim Armstrong, previously CEO of AOL, is now CEO of Oath, which is part of Verizon’s Media and Telematics division. 
 
 Verizon expects to cut about 15% of the workforce of the new Oath organization, representing the elimination of about 2,100 jobs. 
 
 “The close of this transaction represents a critical step in growing the global scale needed for our digital media company,” Marni Walden, Verizon president of Media and Telematics, said in a statement. “The combined set of assets across Verizon and Oath, from VR to AI, 5G to IoT, from content partnerships to originals, will create exciting new ways to captivate audiences across the globe.” 
 
 Related Verizon to Cut More Than 2,000 Jobs at AOL-Yahoo After Yahoo Deal Closes 
 
 The Oath portfolio includes HuffPost, Yahoo Sports, AOL.com, MAKERS, Tumblr, Build Studios, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Mail. 
 
 Mayer exits Yahoo with stock holdings worth more than $200 million. The company hired Mayer, a former top engineering exec at Google, in 2012 hoping she could turn around Yahoo — once among the strongest brands in the internet sector. But after four years of steady revenue declines and shifts in strategy, Mayer and the Yahoo board opted to sell the company to Verizon last summer. 
 
 On Mayer’s watch, Yahoo was hit by two of the biggest security breaches in internet history, resulting in the theft of info on more than 1 billion user accounts. Earlier this year Yahoo’s board said it would not pay an annual bonus to Mayer because of her handling of the incidents, and she also did not receive an equity grant for 2017. The hacks led Verizon to cut $350 million from the purchase price for Yahoo’s internet businesses. 
 
 “It’s been my great honor and privilege to be a part of this team for the last five years,” Mayer wrote in a post on Tumblr. “Together, we have rebuilt, reinvented, strengthened, and modernized our products, our business, and our company. Mayer led the acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, her biggest acquisition as CEO of Yahoo; the company eventually wrote off more than half the value ascribed to Tumblr. 
 
 In her post, Mayer noted that Yahoo’s stock price more than tripled since she joined in July 2012, resulting in an increase of $43 billion in market capitalization. But the stock performance was entirely due to Yahoo’s investment holdings in Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group, which predated Mayer’s tenure. 
 
 Yahoo Inc., meanwhile, as previously announced will change its name to “Altaba Inc.” effective June 16. The company’s remaining assets include a 15% equity stake in Alibaba; a 36% equity stake in Yahoo Japan; and Excalibur IP LLC, which owns certain patent assets that were not core to Yahoo’s operating business. Altaba’s CEO is Thomas McInerney, former CFO of Barry Diller’s IAC, and the company has relocated its headquarters to New York City.
– In its confirmation of Verizon's purchase of Yahoo's web assets, announced Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal describes it as a "remarkable fall" for Yahoo, once valued at more than $125 billion and now plucked up for less than 4% of that—$4.83 billion in cash. A rundown of the deal's specifics, and how it's being reported: Read CEO Marissa Mayer's lengthy letter to Yahooers about the "amazing opportunities [Yahoo will realize] in its next chapter" here. Bloomberg explains what Verizon is and isn't getting: yes to Yahoo's real estate, no to Yahoo's cash and its shares in Alibaba Group Holding. Business Insider reports AOL head Tim Armstrong will likely emerge as CEO of an AOL-Yahoo combo (Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015). It issues a warning: "The siren song of Yahoo has lured others before him. And Armstrong's desire to revive the struggling internet business may leave him blinded to the same trap as his predecessors." The Washington Post points out the Mayer turned down a deal to buy Yahoo two years ago—a deal Armstrong offered. It looks at what Armstrong, and Verizon, want with Yahoo. In her letter, Mayer writes, "For me personally, I'm planning to stay." It's unclear how long she'll stay for, or in what capacity. In a piece heralding the "saddest $5 billion deal in tech history," Forbes reports Mayer is expected to be handed a $50 million-plus severance package when she does go. Quartz looks at how the deal might allow Verizon to "mount a credible challenge to those two giants": Google and Facebook. The giants own about half the $69 billion US digital ad market. Verizon plus AOL plus Yahoo would claim about 5.2%. Recode profiles Marni Walden, the 49-year-old Verizon exec (and Armstrong boss and "rising star") who drove the deal. The New York Times uses a series of infographics to explain why Yahoo sold itself.