Verizon sells internet trailblazers Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion

and Yahoo are being sold again, this time to a private equity firm.

Wireless company Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the oncepioneering tech platforms, to

Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal.

Verizon said Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo.

Yahoo at the end of the last century was the face of the internet, preceding the behemoth tech platforms Google and Facebook. And AOL was the portal, bringAOL ing the web to almost everyone who logged on during the internet’s earliest days.

Verizon spent about $9 billion buying AOL and Yahoo over two years starting in 2015, hoping to jumpstart a digital-media business that would compete with Google and Facebook. It didn’t work as Google and Facebook and, increasingly,

Amazon dominate the U.S. digital-ad market. The year after buying Yahoo, Verizon wrote down the value of the combined operation by roughly the value of the $4.5 billion that it had spent on Yahoo.

Verizon has been shedding media assets as it refocuses on wireless, spending billions on licensing the airwaves needed for 5G, the next generation of faster mobile service. It sold blogging site Tumblr in 2019 and HuffPost to BuzzFeed late last year. The digitalmedia sector in recent years has been consolidating as companies seek profitability.

The properties that Verizon is selling include Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail and the tech blogs Engadget and TechCrunch.

Despite its difficulty competing with tech giants for ad dollars, leading to cost cuts and layoffs, Verizon Media’s revenue rose 10% in the most recent quarter from the year before, to $1.9 billion. The division still has nearly 900 million monthly users and generated $7 billion in revenue in 2020, according to Verizon and Apollo.