Oath springs up from Yahoo

Mayer out as Verizon closes $ 4.4B deal, then combines it with AOL

The deal is done: Verizon is now the owner of Yahoo, one of the originalWeb portals.

The telecommunications giant won a four- month sale process in July 2016 and agreed to pay $ 4.8 billion for Yahoo. The price tag was reduced to about $ 4.48 billion with a $ 350 million discount in the wake of two massive data breaches Yahoo revealed.

Yahoo itself will be no more. Verizon is combining the Net media company with AOL, another originalWeb giant, to create Oath, a new company with 50- plus media and tech brands including AOL. com, HuffPost, Yahoo Sports and YahooMail.

“We are excited to set our focus on being the best company for consumer media, and the best partner to our advertising, content and publisher partners,” said Tim Armstrong, the former CEO of AOL who is now CEO of Oath, in a statement.

Yahoo CEO MarissaMayer is

resigning with the transaction’s closure. Five years ago, Yahoo hired Mayer, who had been a rising star at Google, to help it regain ground lost in digital ad wars with Google and Facebook. Mayer helped Yahoo improve its mobile ad business, but acquisitions including the $ 1 billion deal for Tumblr failed to gain traction.

Last year, Google and Facebook owned about 33% and 14%, respectively, of the $ 190.6 billion global digital advertising market, according to eMarketer. Yahoo and Verizon’s AOL and Millennial Media units owned 1.6% and 0.7%, respectively.

As for Yahoo, it will become Altaba and will consist of the company’s 15% equity stake in Alibaba, valued at about $ 52 billion, and its 36% equity stake in Yahoo Japan, about $ 9 billion, as well as other assets.