Yahoo is no more, but what does that mean for my email and Fantasy Sports?
So Yahoo, the company, has bitten the dust.
Verizon now officially owns the one-time Web portal, paying $4.48 billion, and is merging Yahoo with AOL to create a new entity called Oath, which resides within Verizon’s media and telematics group.
But what does that mean to the 1 billion or so users of popular features such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance and Tumblr? For now, thankfully, not much.
Users of Yahoo and AOL brands can find clickable links to all their favorite destinations on the Oath home page. But the traditional paths to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Tumblr and AOL.com still work as they always have.
Some questions Yahoo users might have:
QWill the email address on my longtime Yahoo Mail account change?
ANot as of now. Oath CEO Tim Armstrong, the former CEO of AOL, said recently the Yahoo brands — including Yahoo Mail — are not going away. If you haven’t logged in lately, Yahoo has asked users to change their passwords in the wake of separate hacks impacting more than 500 million and 1 billion accounts, respectively.
QWhat about Yahoo Fantasy Sports?
AThose games won’t be rebranded as “Oath Fantasy Baseball” as of now. Yahoo Sports properties are very popular and are not expected to disappear.
QMight any other Oath brands change into something else?
AArmstrong has described Oath as a B2B entity, an umbrella brand over the names you are already familiar with — services such as Tumblr and Flickr and outlets such as HuffPost, Engadget and TechCrunch.
Overall, about 1.3 billion consumers use the company’s collection of 50-plus brands, making them some of the most powerful online destinations.
For now, those long-loved brands such as Yahoo Finance and Flickr — and AOL Mail — remain. AOL and Yahoo, the corporate brands, “go away” to be replaced by Oath under Verizon, says Caroline Campbell, senior vice president for brands and communications at AOL.
“No properties are going away from either company — and we will invest in them,” she said.
But Oath, itself, “is not a consumer brand,” Armstrong told CNBC two months ago. “Over time, if there are brands we can create around Oath we will think about that, but the most important brands we have are things like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Tumblr and Huffington Post.”