Verizon said to be near deal to acquire Yahoo

The end of Yahoo as an independent company may be near, and Verizon — long considered the leading contender to buy the aging web pioneer — is the most likely acquirer.

The two companies are in advanced talks over a takeover of Yahoo that could be worth close to $5 billion, a person briefed on the matter said Friday.

Any transaction would be for Yahoo’s core Internet business. It is unclear whether a deal would also include other assets like real estate or patents.

Both companies are hoping to announce a deal as early as next week, this person said. Verizon is scheduled to report earnings Tuesday.

Still, no final deal has been reached and the talks could still falter, the person cautioned. One of the other finalists could also re-emerge with a higher bid.

A spokesperson for Verizon declined to comment, while a Yahoo spokesperson said the company would not comment “until we have a definitive agreement to announce” because it wanted to maintain “the integrity of the process.”

When Yahoo finally began exploring a sale of its core business — a sprawling collection of properties including its sports and news sites, email and the social network Tumblr — Verizon was considered the front-runner by analysts and investors. The telecommunications behemoth already owned AOL, another one-time Internet darling.

Bankers for Yahoo cast a wide net for the auction, and a number of potential suitors emerged. The field was winnowed down to a handful of bidders, which included AT&T, private equity firms like TPG Capital, and the Quicken Loans co-founder Dan Gilbert, with the backing of Warren E. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway.

But people involved in the process long believed that Verizon, with its enormous cash pile and its ability to wring out efficiencies by merging Yahoo with AOL, was the most likely winner.

Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research, said that combining AOL with Yahoo would create a stronger No. 3 digital platform for online advertising, after Google and Facebook. “This is a 1 plus 1 equals 2 ½,” he said. Verizon, which had $132 billion in revenue last year, has been trying to build up its digital content portfolio, particularly in mobile and video, to serve customers of its wireless phone, cable TV and Internet businesses. Last year, it bought AOL for $4.4 billion, acquiring not just its content sites like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, but also the advertising technology used to target online ads to Internet users.

Yahoo would bring in a huge amount of additional news, sports and finance content — and the one billion people a month who visit Yahoo services — and would offer Verizon another set of sophisticated ad technologies.