The Yahoo board has chosen to accept Verizon’s acquisition bid, and Recode reports that competing bidders were informed of the decision Saturday afternoon. The news is expected to be made public on Monday, though sources suggested that timeline wasn’t set in stone. They did say the parties hoped to make the announcement before Verizon’s Tuesday earnings report.
Details of the deal are still unknown, but numbers for the acquisition have hovered around $5 billion. The acquisition would include Yahoo’s core editorial and search businesses. As Matthew Ingram explained earlier in the process, the deal would bolster Verizon’s move into digital advertising, aligning with last year’s $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL.
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Yahoo and AOL (AOL) would likely be merged into a unified content and advertising business under Verizon (VZ). Recode’s sources suggest that merging will be “very tough,” and that it would likely be managed by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, with Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer exiting.
Such a merger would amount to an ignominious coda for two former giants of the first digital gold rush. At the time of its 2000 merger with Time-Warner (TWX), AOL was valued at over $226 billion, but the company cratered when its subscription model was undermined. Similarly, Yahoo’s once-dominant position in a portal-based digital advertising world has dwindled in the face of Google (GOOG) and Facebook’s (FB) search and social advertising offerings.
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Bidders competing with Verizon have included AT&T (T) and private equity group TPG.
Yahoo’s (YHOO) stock is up slightly in after-hours trading, and has seen gains over the past month despite a mixed-to-disappointing earnings report last week.
