How Verizon hopes to grab digital ad dollars with Yahoo

NEW YORK, June 10, (AP): Verizon has a simple goal in buying Yahoo: It wants to challenge Google and Facebook in the huge and lucrative field of digital advertising. But Verizon faces its own challenge in doing so, given that it will be competing against a slew of other companies also looking to break in.

Verizon wants to become a strong third choice for advertisers by adding Yahoo’s popular sites and billion users worldwide to its own media business, which includes AOL and Verizon’s home-grown go90 video service. It can place ads on those sites, and can also combine data from visitors to those sites with AOL’s ad technologies and sales teams, and possibly also personal data from Verizon mobile customers such as location and other information, in order to better target ads at individuals.

The company did not reply to questions on how it might integrate mobile-customer data with the ad business.

Yahoo’s shareholders on Thursday approved the $4.5 billion sale of its key businesses to Verizon. The deal is expected to close by June 13. The combination of AOL and Yahoo will cut 15 percent of its 14,000-person workforce, or about 2,100 jobs, said a person familiar with the matter who didn’t want to be identified.

Yahoo and AOL are “positioned to do better together than apart,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said.

But he is setting the bar low. While Verizon talks of growth from the deal, Wieser said “not declining would be a success. Five years from now, if the combined entity were the same size as it is today, I would consider that to be successful.”

Verizon sees online ads — particularly targeted ads based on user data — as a potential new source of growth as the wireless industry fights for US users with lower prices and other discounts. Verizon has “essentially turned into a no-growth business,” said CFRA Research’s Angelo Zino. The ad business would be a “big deal” for Verizon if it goes well, he said.

Tim Armstrong, the former Google executive who joined AOL as CEO in 2009, has for years wanted to combine AOL with the long-declining Yahoo. Although AOL has big-name properties such as HuffPost and Engadget, AOL hasn’t been as big of an online destination as Yahoo’s mail, finance, sports and other properties.

The combined business, to be called Oath, will expand its news, sports, entertainment, finance and lifestyle coverage. Like everyone else, Oath will focus on video and mobile, where consumers increasingly spend their time online.

Armstrong says he wants Oath properties to be a place consumers “come and visit every day” and predicts users growing to 2 billion from 1.3 billion by 2020, with annual revenue of $10 billion to $20 billion from roughly $7 billion today.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam teased last month that this could set the stage for a new streaming video service, competing with the slew of internet-TV services already out there. Verizon already has a free mobile video service, go90, that isn’t well known.

Facebook and Google together draw about half the world’s spending on digital ads, and in the US, they’re even more dominant. They’re also where the majority of mobile-ad dollars go, eMarketer data show.

The sway Facebook and Google hold for advertisers isn’t expected to change in the next few years. They had a head start on mobile. Yahoo has poured billions into acquisitions that have helped Yahoo make some leeway in mobile — but not enough. It’s gotten better at doing mobile ads, but it has had no major hit apps.

Still, AOL and Yahoo together provide a much-smaller No. 3 in the US for advertisers looking to reach lots of people. But even if Verizon’s goal is to just be happy at No. 3, there are several much smaller players that also draw advertisers.