After months of bidding, Yahoo has finally found a buyer. Verizon (which owns AOL ie America Online ) is officially acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion in cash, which includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities.
Verizon wants to merge Yahoo and AOL to form a bigger advertising and media subsidiary. This way, AOL gets more scale and reaches enough internet and mobile users to become an advertising giant reaching hundreds of millions or even billions of people.
Eventually, Verizon wants to compete with Google and Facebook when it comes to advertising. Online advertising is currently dominated by the two Silicon Valley-based companies. Verizon wants to become the third way.
This isn’t the first time a telecom company has been looking at ways to provide and operate more than computers and phones. Verizon now wants to control what’s going through the company and thus is investing a lot of money in this venture.
In grabbing Yahoo, which it will merge with its AOL operation, Verizon beat out rival bidders including Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, whose bid had been backed by billionaire Warren Buffett who also clearly had interest.
