How to buy Yahoo! Shares?
Yahoo was once one of the largest internet companies in the world. Nowadays, the company as we know it no longer exists. The search engine and other services have been sold to Verizon Communications. The company itself changed its name to Altaba Inc. and is no longer listed on the stock exchange. In this article you can read how investing in Yahoo nowadays works.
About the company Yahoo!
The U.S. company Yahoo! Inc. became known mainly through the search engine and the portal site. Together with Outlook.com and Gmail, Yahoo! was one of the largest providers of free Internet services. The company no longer exists: Yahoo! sold its business activities to Verizon Communications in mid-2017. Verizon paid 4.8 billion to acquire the company. That’s little for a company that was worth $125 billion at its peak.
The company Altaba Inc.
Not everything from Yahoo! was sold. The company’s equity interest in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan remain in the company. On June 16, 2017, the name of the company was changed to Altaba Inc. Yahoo’s remaining remains will continue under that name.
Altaba has meanwhile been liquidated and the shareholders achieve a small return. Altaba is no longer tradable on the stock exchange.
You can still invest in Verizon Communications. Yahoo is just a small part of this large telecom company. Do you want to know how to buy Verizon Communication shares? Read our article on buying shares to learn what you need to know:
The start of Yahoo
The founders of Yahoo are Jerry Yang and David Filo. They founded the website ‘Jerry’s Guide To The World Wide Web’ in 1994. These were the early years of the internet when search engines were still in their infancy. Also, there were not yet billions of websites. It was not easy to find interesting websites. Soon Yahoo! became one of the most popular search engines. As a result, the advertising revenue of the website increased significantly.
Yahoo takes over GeoCities
The first real acquisition of Yahoo! is to buy the webhoster GeoCities. For this acquisition the company paid 3.6 billion U.S. dollars. Buying GeoCities was a trip to the promising social media. However, the acquisition was not a success. Many users of GeoCities left the site after the acquisition because they did not agree with the new condition that the photos and texts on Geocities became the property of Yahoo.
Yahoo! quickly dropped the condition, but it was already too late. In addition, in an effort to make GeoCities profitable, the company took some other controversial decisions. The free limits on accounts were lowered. Also, they launched several premium subscriptions that turned out to be unpopular.
More and more competition
After 2000 Yahoo! got more and more competition. There were many alternatives to the services offered by Yahoo!. Photos could also be shared on the rapidly growing Myspace and later Facebook. Moreover, Facebook was able to combine the different services. On Facebook, you can create pages just like with Geocities. Also, just like on Flickr, you can share photos.
Competition from Google
Google and Yahoo were founded around the same time. Google became bigger and more powerful. Yahoo could not keep up with the competition. In 2000, the company came to the conclusion that competing was pointless. In 2000, the company implemented Google’s technology in its search function. Google received a considerable amount of money for this. The deal with Google was rescinded in 2004 and in 2009, Yahoo switched to Bing. With this switch, the company could use Microsoft Technology for its search function.
Sad 5 billion acquisition
Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017 for $4.8 billion. Forbes called this “the saddest 5 billion acquisition in tech history. In 2000, Yahoo was still worth 125 billion dollars.
The company was surpassed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, among others. In the past, several companies tried to buy Yahoo. In 2008, Microsoft offered another 48 billion for the company. Yahoo felt it was too little and rejected the offer.
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When I was 16, I secretly bought my first stock. Since that ‘proud moment’ I have been managing trading.info for over 10 years. It is my goal to educate people about financial freedom. After my studies business administration and psychology, I decided to put all my time in developing this website. Since I love to travel, I work from all over the world. Click here to read more about trading.info! Don’t hesitate to leave a comment under this article.