Under Oath? How Yahoo plus AOL may change your Web life

Name might be changing, but not much else will

Are you ready to check in with your fantasy football team on Oath Sports? Or your stock portfolio on Oath Finance?

Don’t worry, you won’t have to. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s tweet that announced the creation of a new company — Oath — under parent Verizon to hold assets including AOL and soon- to- be- acquired Yahoo is something marketers more than consumers will have to wrestle with.

Armstrong stressed the brands will stay the same. We are going to be “all in in terms of building awesome products and services among the biggest brands we have,” he told CNBC on Tuesday.

Here’s how the Oath news might impact you.

Q: I’ve had a Yahoo Mail account for years. Is my email address going to change?

A: Extremely unlikely. As Armstrong said, the Yahoo brands are not going anywhere, and that includes an email account some people have had since Bill Clinton was in the White House. Of course, Yahoo Mail is already under a cloud, given the separate hacks disclosed by Yahoo that have impacted more than 500 million and 1 billion accounts, respectively.

Q: Will Verizon supply that new email account?

A: I’m not exactly betting on a retro resurgence of AOL Mail, though millions of people still hear the familiar “You’ve Got Mail” refrain, including folks who recently moved over from the discontinued Verizon. net email service. And while Oath. com kind of has a nice ring to it, I’m not counting on a new email service to go by that name. Verizon declined to comment.

Q: I’m an avid Yahoo Fantasy Sports participant. Will I be playing Oath Fantasy Baseball or Oath Fantasy Football?

A: Again, unlikely. Yahoo Sports properties are enormously popular and the same principle applies here: The Yahoo brand doesn’t go away, and that holds true for all the fantasy games you can play from within Yahoo covering baseball, football, hockey, basketball, golf and other sports. Q: And Yahoo Finance? A: Yahoo Finance isn’t going to disappear, either. You’ll be able to check on your portfolio, the markets and other financial news, just as you always have.

Q: Will any of the other brands under Oath morph into something else?

A: Armstrong has described Oath as a B2B brand, overseeing the names you are all familiar with. Beyond Yahoo and AOL, those include Tumblr, Huffington

Post, TechCrunch and Engadget. In all, about 1.3 billion consumers use the company’s collection of brands, making these among the most powerful on the Internet.

We are going to be “all in in terms of building awesome products and services among the biggest brands we have.” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, above

ANDREW GOMBERT, EPA