Yahoo has finally laid down its arms after a decade of struggle against its ailing business. Reports have surfaced that Verizon Communications will be acquiring Yahoo’s core business in a $4.8 billion deal. No further details regarding the deal were released.
The company, founded in 1994, was one of the internet’s pioneers of the web. It initially started as a directory of websites but later expanded by offering a search engine, email services, shopping and news. The model worked for quite some time, but things started to change when Google and Facebook entered the picture. The tides quickly turned for Yahoo and it found itself struggling to keep afloat in the competition against the emerging giants.
Yahoo was fading by the mid-2000s, gradually losing its relevance as Google became the dominant search engine of the Internet and with Facebook attracting more and more users. In 2007, a $44.6 billion offer by Microsoft was controversially rebuffed by then CEO Jerry Yang which garnered the ire of its shareholders.
Compared to the 2007 Microsoft offer, the present deal is chump change. More interestingly, Yahoo had a peak value of a whopping $125 billion in 2000.
