As Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) acquired AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL) for $4.4 billion, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has finally revealed why they did not consider buying the company. Speaking at a Fortune Most Powerful Women event, CEO, Marissa Mayer, said that analysts had predicted last year that Yahoo was considering buying AOL, but the merger never happened.
She said that there was not even a possibility of a buyout as the two companies were poles apart. AOL has always focused on programmatic advertising, according to her, while Yahoo is working on the MaVeNS (mobile, video, native advertising, and social) platform. Mayer was focused on making Yahoo a distinguish media company, and that would have changed if the company bought AOL.
AOL More Into Republishing Content
Mayer believes that AOL was doing a good job in bringing to the users content from others, but that was not what Yahoo wanted to do. She said that while republishing content from other partners was not wrong but that does not make a company different or give them an edge over the others. Mayer gives more importance to the brand maintenance and building a client interface service where monetizing was not the focus.
The end user associations were valued by Yahoo as that was the segment, which the company was working on. For achieving this, Yahoo appointed Katie Couric and David Pogue, and they were both proving to be an important asset to the company. Couric and Pogue are getting a handsome salary of over $5 million a year. Mayer feels that hiring Couric has already started yielding good results in terms of ad revenue that the video content of the company has been generating.
According to reports, Mayer seems to have become much mellow in her answer for not buying AOL, and she said in July 2014 that merging with AOL was ‘small, unexciting and backward-looking.’ Meanwhile, as AOL goes to Verizon, the analysts are busy making estimates about the future as there have been no comments from both sides on the next move. The only thing that seems possible is to wait and watch as Yahoo gets busy with being different.
Sources: fortune.com, Businessinsider.in, entrepreneur.com
