OLD Media Moves

Yahoo Finance, TechCrunch being sold to Apollo

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.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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