REPORTS: VERIZON TO BUY YAHOO FOR $4.8 BILLION

Yahoo SAN FRANCISCO — was the front door to the web for an early generation of internet users, and its ser- vices still attract a billion visitors a month.

But the internet is an unforgiving place for yes- terday’s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an inde- pendent company.

The board of the Silicon Valley company agreed to sell Yahoo’s core internet operations and land hold- ings to Verizon for $4.8 bil- lion, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak about the deal before the planned announcement on Monday morning.

After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents.

That’s a pittance compared with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000.

Ve r i z on and Yahoo declined to comment about the deal.

Founded in 1994, Yahoo was one of the last inde- pendently operated pio- neers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking com- panies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom.

But Yahoo, despite const a nt management tur- moil, kept growing. Started as a directory of websites, the company was soon doing much more, offer- ing searches, email, shop- ping and news. Those services, which were free to consumers, were supported by advertising displayed on its various pages.

For a long time, the model worked. It seemed like every company in America — and across much of the world — wanted to reach people using the new medium, and ad revenue poured in to Yahoo.

In the end, the company was done in by Google and Facebook.