Apollo Global Management Inc. has agreed to acquire Verizon’s media businesses, which include Yahoo Finance and TechCrunch, in a deal worth $5 billion, reports Micah Maidenberg and Drew FitzGerald of The Wall Street Journal.
Maidenberg and Fitzgerald report, “Other suitors previously showed interest in buying off certain pieces of the media unit, which includes websites such as TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance, but weren’t willing to make an offer for the whole portfolio, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Verizon collected some of the web’s best-known brands starting in 2015 with its purchase of AOL, followed by its 2017 acquisition of Yahoo. AOL’s then-chief, Tim Armstrong, called the new business a super channel for advertisers to reach hundreds of millions of users.
“Executives framed the newly named Oath business as an alternative way for marketers to reach potential customers outside of a digital ecosystem dominated by Google, Facebook and Amazon.com Inc. But the stitched-together media group couldn’t keep up with its technology rivals’ explosive sales growth, and Verizon in 2018 wrote down about half of the value of the media brands it had acquired.”
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