Yahoo! Inc. agreed to sell its main web businesses to Verizon Communications Inc. for $4.8 billion, ending a two-decade run as an independent company that took it from Stanford University startup at the dawn of the internet age to also-ran behind nimbler online rivals such as Google and Facebook Inc. 
 
 The all-cash deal includes Yahoo real estate, but excludes some intellectual property which will be sold separately. Yahoo will be left with its stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo Japan Corp., with a combined market value of about $40 billion. 
 
 Verizon will add Yahoo web services that still draw 1 billion monthly users, including mail, news and sports content and financial tools. The largest U.S. wireless carrier also gets smaller but faster-growing assets including mobile applications and advertising technology for video and handheld devices. 
 
 Yahoo shares closed 1.4 percent higher on Friday at $39.38, giving the company a market valuation of $37 billion. Yahoo stock has risen 18.4 percent so far this year. 
 
 Verizon on Friday ended 1.3 percent higher at $56.10. The company’s market capitalization is $229 billion. ||||| While AOL chief Tim Armstrong has been a key part of Verizon’s Yahoo pursuit, the driving force on the Verizon side is his boss, longtime Verizon executive Marni Walden. 
 
 The career cellphone executive has been leading the company’s moves beyond telecommunications, particularly its expansion into video and advertising, and was instrumental in the acquisition of AOL. 
 
 All the players in telecom talk about wanting to be more than just a “dumb pipe,” and Walden has been leading the charge at Verizon. 
 
 “Making sure that you play in accessing the revenue opportunities above the connectivity is something we think a lot about,” she told Recode in an interview late last year. “We can go do other things because of our strength in mobile.” 
 
 Walden, 49, has spent her life in the wireless industry, since the days when cellphones were things that came in a briefcase. Her move to join the nascent mobile business was a far cry from her childhood growing up on a Wyoming cattle ranch. 
 
 “When I was growing up, I wanted to be either a cowboy or a ballet dancer,” Walden told Bloomberg earlier this year. “But neither seemed like reasonable options.’’ 
 
 Walden did show both an early knack for the cellphone business as well as significant staying power in rising to become one of the most powerful women in the industry. 
 
 She served as both operating chief and marketing chief for Verizon Wireless after getting her start at the company as a regional executive for both it and predecessor AirTouch Cellular. She also worked earlier in her career at AT&T Wireless and McCaw Cellular, among other cellphone companies. 
 
 These days, though, Walden is in charge of new business opportunities for Verizon. Some of those are things that involve the cellular business, such as connected cars, but much of Walden’s work has been in areas new to both her and Verizon. 
 
 “People are surprised about Verizon getting into the content space,” Walden told Recode last year. “I think that’s really important to bring eyeballs and audience. Our media business will play a much more significant role in the Verizon of the future.” 
 
 It hasn’t all been easy going for Verizon, particularly its efforts in video programming. The company launched a mobile video service known as Go90 last year, but it remains a relative nonentity. 
 
 Rather than boasting well-known shows, big sports deals or original programming, Go90 has relied on short clips it hopes will appeal to the YouTube generation. In that vein, Verizon recently hired former YouTube executive Ivana Kirkbride to be Go90’s chief content officer. 
 
 Probably the biggest thing going for Go90 is that it can undercut rivals on price. Not only is there no price for subscribing, but for Verizon Wireless customers, using the service doesn’t even count against their data cap. 
 
 While watching a few movies on Netflix or binge-watching TV shows on Hulu can quickly eat through a customer’s plan, Verizon users are free to watch as much Go90 as they like. Verizon hasn’t said just how many people are actually taking the company up on the offer, but net neutrality advocates hate the way Verizon is prioritizing its own service. 
 
 Walden made it clear in last year’s interview that Verizon might need to make more acquisitions — possibly including Yahoo — to reach its ambitions in the media and content realm. 
 
 “We didn’t get into the media company business just to be a single-digit market share player,” Walden said. “We have much bigger aspirations of how we want to grow that business. Some can happen because of the scale Verizon brings, but we will continue to look at how we can scale and be a meaningful player from a double-digit market share, and by market share, I think about revenue. We definitely will look to build this business.” ||||| Verizon Communications Inc. on Monday announced plans to buy Yahoo Inc.’s Web assets for $4.83 billion in cash, ending a drawn-out auction process for the beleaguered internet company. WSJ’s Ryan Knutson joins Lunch Break with the details. Photo: AP 
 
 Verizon Communications Inc. on Monday said it would buy Yahoo Inc.’s Web assets for $4.83 billion in cash, ending a drawn-out process for the beleaguered internet company. 
 
 The price, which includes Yahoo’s core internet business and some real estate, caps a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer that had a market capitalization... ||||| Verizon announced an agreement to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion on Monday, July 25. The agreement marks the end of an era for the company that once defined the Internet. (Reuters) 
 
 Two years ago — an epoch in Silicon Valley time — AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong proposed a merger to Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer. 
 
 Armstrong and Mayer are former Googlers hired to run and rescue these former marquee Internet destinations. But AOL and Yahoo were struggling in an increasingly mobile online world dominated by Google and Facebook. 
 
 Mayer rejected Armstrong's offer. 
 
 But now that AOL-Yahoo merger is set to take place in a wholly unexpected manner — thanks to Verizon, the largest U.S. phone carrier. On Monday, Verizon and Yahoo announced that the telecom giant agreed to buy the ailing Internet company in a $4.8 billion deal. Last year, Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion. 
 
 “Just over a year ago we acquired AOL to enhance our strategy of providing a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers. The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company,” said Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdam in a statement. 
 
 Verizon has always been considered to be one of the most likely suitors for Yahoo, which has been officially for sale since April, after several years of failed turnaround plans executed under Mayer. 
 
 With the deal, Tim Armstrong would in many ways be getting the merger he once wanted. 
 
 Tim Armstrong may finally be getting what he wanted. (Bloomberg News) 
 
 "Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers," Armstrong said in a statement. 
 
 Armstrong, who heads Verizon's AOL unit, is expected to be a key player. A reading of his tenure at AOL offers some insight into what the future may mean for Yahoo, which would probably turn into a more focused advertising company. 
 
 AOL is still heavily involved in media content, thanks to its ownership of the Huffington Post, but even with those businesses, it has kept a strong advertising focus. 
 
 Many admire Armstrong for sticking with AOL, said Eric Jackson of SpringOwl — a firm invested in Yahoo that has been very critical of Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo. 
 
 “​He could have quit a couple of years into it,” Jackson said. “Many people say to me they wouldn’t do business with AOL if it was anyone but Tim Armstrong.” 
 
 Landing Yahoo would also provide Verizon with a sizable cut of the U.S. online market. Yahoo and AOL might not be trendy names, but they ranked No. 3 and No. 6 respectively in ComScore’s list of the top digital media properties in the United States in February. 
 
 Add AOL and Yahoo together, and their unique visitors were 50 percent greater than No. 1 Google. 
 
 [What you need to know about Marissa Mayer's future] 
 
 Verizon’s desire for Yahoo spotlights the grand scale of its ambitions: Not happy with just providing access to content, it wants to own a fat chunk of the online-content industry. 
 
 Consumers are migrating from simple email and Web browsing on their smartphones to rich mobile video and online games. And these data-hog services represent a lucrative opportunity to sell ads and, in some cases, could be a source of subscription revenue. 
 
 Analysts say the sprawling nature of Yahoo's properties led its leadership astray. 
 
 "Yahoo has failed for the last 13 years to exploit as a unified whole what is actually an excellent set of parts," said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Yahoo hasn't been able to clearly define what it is and what value it provides." 
 
 Yahoo was a platform for content, and a failing one. 
 
 But Verizon apparently thinks that grabbing Yahoo’s content, combined with its strength in distribution, will allow Verizon to create better, more valuable ads, VanBoskirk said. 
 
 Verizon’s move first for AOL, and now Yahoo, signals how traditional telephone and Internet companies are worried that their businesses are being commodified. Cutthroat competition in recent years has prompted price wars. This pressure is what helped drive Comcast to snatch up NBCUniversal in 2011 and AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV in 2015. 
 
 Meanwhile, Internet providers such as Verizon face other pressures. 
 
 Federal data show that Americans are increasingly abandoning their home broadband connections in favor of mobile data connections. Analysts say the shift toward mobile partly explains why Verizon has been shedding some of its traditional wired operations in recent years. And it also provides insight into Verizon's pursuit of a proprietary mobile video platform Go90. 
 
 The nearly $5 billion bid for Yahoo highlights just how mightily the Internet company has struggled. After all, Yahoo's stock market valuation alone is $38 billion. But many investors think almost all of Yahoo’s value is tied up in shares it owns in the Chinese commerce site Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Those shares are not part of Verizon's deal. 
 
 The sale of Yahoo comes with access to Yahoo's news operation and Yahoo Finance, a website for investors keeping tabs on Wall Street. It includes Yahoo's popular destination for fantasy sports, and its question-and-answer platform, Yahoo Answers. Plus, Yahoo owns the microblogging site Tumblr and the photo-hosting site Flickr. 
 
 The deal may also face some potential land mines. 
 
 Activists and regulators in Washington are increasingly examining strict new privacy rules on Internet providers, according to Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at MoffettNathanson. 
 
 To turn content views into advertising dollars, Verizon wants to use and share the behavioral data it collects on its Internet subscribers — including records such as its customers' Web browsing and location history. 
 
 But under the plan being weighed by federal regulators, Internet providers would be required to get their customers' explicit permission before using that data for third-party advertising. 
 
 In other words, customers would need to opt in, explicitly agreeing that their data be used. 
 
 The industry has fought the proposed requirement from the Federal Communications Commission, saying it would make it harder to adapt to the future. 
 
 The rules would do more than that, Moffett said: It would also make it harder for Verizon to justify spending billions on a Web property it cannot efficiently monetize. 
 
 "Buying Yahoo would be very much going in the direction of buying a significant amount of ad inventory," Moffett said. "And while it's likely the case that a mobile operator could increase the value of that ad inventory by overlaying better user targeting based on wireless location data, the FCC privacy regime may blow up that strategy." 
 
 Verizon's swallowing up Yahoo, after already buying AOL, transforms the telecom “into a big data super-giant,” cautioned Jeff Chester, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy. 
 
 “Yahoo is not a primary threat,” Chester said. “But when you merge Yahoo with the ability of an ISP [Internet-service provider] to monitor everything someone does, that’s a threat.” 
 
 The deal is expected to close early next year. 
 
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 Save ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it's being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change. 
 
 On Monday morning, Yahoo announced the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $4.8 billion in cash. The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley's most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo's seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart upon the deal's conclusion with severence pay worth more than $50 million. 
 
 The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion. The United States' largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers. 
 
 "Today’s announcement not only brings us an important step toward separating Yahoo’s operating business from our Asian asset equity stakes, it also presents exciting opportunities to accelerate Yahoo’s transformation," Mayer wrote in a email announcing the news. "Among the many entities that showed interest in Yahoo, Verizon believed most in the immense value we’ve created, and in what a combination could bring our users, our advertisers, and our partners." 
 
 Read more: Here Is Marissa Mayer's Final Letter To Yahoo Employees 
 
 But the biggest story today is how Yahoo squandered its massive head start and let each wave of new technology in search, social, and mobile pass it by. Yahoo remains largely the same company it was a decade ago -- a portal that hundreds of millions of users rely on for everything from news and weather to key functions like email and games like fantasy football. As the attention of the world shifted to smartphone apps, Yahoo's last advantage in the desktop world began to fade. 
 
 Yahoo began in 1994 as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," a list of websites curated by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo. It grew quickly as millions of Americans began turning on dial-up Internet connections and needed a home page that would direct them to all their essential destinations. In 1996 it went public and rode the dot-com bubble to epic heights, reaching a peak of $500 a share (or $125 a share in today's post-split calculations) in January 2000. 
 
 Yet Yahoo missed the opportunity of a generation to convert its early lead and millions of users into more than just a portal. At the height of the bubble, it spent $4.5 billion to buy Geocities and $5.7 billion to buy Broadcast.com, but would later reportedly squander the chance to buy young versions of both Google and Facebook. Yahoo's own search offering now holds only a fraction of the market and its eventual purchase of social network Tumblr hasn't made up for the Facebook miss. (Yahoo wrote down Tumblr's value for the second time last week.) 
 
 Over the last four years, Mayer, a former Google executive, tried to right Yahoo's ship. But her tenure was marred by confused strategy and mismanagement. Revenue peaked in 2008, the year after the iPhone came out, and traffic has continued to fall as users find their attention drawn to younger, more relevant websites and apps. 
 
 The one thing that kept Yahoo afloat for this long is Jerry Yang's risky $1 billion bet on Alibaba in 2005. That bought 40% in what would become China's ecommerce king. Yahoo sold parts of that holding over time, but its current stake is still worth more than $30 billion at today's prices. 
 
 However, the investment was so successful that it became worth far more than Yahoo's flagging core business. In 2015, Yahoo's management plotted a tax-free spin off of its Alibaba stake to unlock shareholder value, but scrapped the plan at the last minute when the IRS refused to grant its blessing. Since then, Yahoo has been evaluating "strategic alternatives" with a months-long auction process for its core business that has drawn constant headlines and speculation. The sale will not include the company's stakes in Alibaba or Yahoo Japan. 
 
 Read more: How Jerry Yang Killed Yahoo, By Saving It 
 
 Experts have long pegged Verizon as the frontrunner, but others put in bids. Billionaires Dan Gilbert and Warren Buffett backed one offer, as did the parent company of Yellow Pages, and private equity firm TPG. But in the final accounting, it would be Verizon that snagged Yahoo's technology and web properties off the bargain bin, 22 years after inception. 
 
 It's an ironic end. While the opening of the consumer web made the portal an early online superpower, now Yahoo will be eaten by a company that enables more users to access the Internet every day, from anywhere, than Yahoo's founders ever could have dreamed when they first launched. ||||| Verizon Communications has announced it is buying Yahoo’s core businesses for $4.83 billion—a steep price to pay for internet assets that are considered “worthless” by Wall Street. 
 
 
 
 The deal makes sense for Verizon, though. 
 
 As one of the largest US telecom carriers, Verizon faces market saturation and limited growth prospects in its traditional business. Its purchase of Yahoo, which follows its acquisition of AOL in May 2015, provides more evidence that it sees online content and advertising as a primary way to increase growth. 
 
 Under the deal, Verizon will get Yahoo’s online assets including search, mail, and instant messaging, along with its ad technology and various real estate holdings. The sale does not include Yahoo’s cash, nor its stakes in Alibaba Group Holdings and Yahoo Japan. These and a handful of other assets will stay with Yahoo, which plans to change its name when the Verizon transaction closes and will remain a publicly traded company. 
 
 For Verizon, the acquisition of Yahoo’s core internet assets puts the telecom giant “in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising,” Verizon chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam said in a press release announcing the transaction. 
 
 In the online advertising business, Verizon faces two main competitors: Google and Facebook. By meshing together various tools from AOL, Yahoo, and its own operations, Verizon might be able to mount a credible challenge to those two giants. Verizon already has AOL’s advertising technology—and Yahoo’s has been criticized—but Yahoo’s prowess in native advertising could prove useful, especially in the mobile space. Yahoo also could help Verizon improve in the search arena, where it lags. 
 
 Meanwhile, Yahoo will bring in hundreds of millions more viewers from sites like News, Sports, and Finance to complement Verizon’s popular properties like TechCrunch and Huffington Post. In the US, comScore puts Yahoo at No. 3 among digital properties. 
 
 “Yahoo and AOL popularized the Internet, email, search and real-time media,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in the joint announcement of the deal. “It’s poetic to be joining forces with AOL and Verizon as we enter our next chapter focused on achieving scale on mobile.” 
 
 Of course, even with the AOL and Yahoo assets, Verizon has a long way to go (paywall) to catch up with the online advertising leaders. Verizon with AOL currently holds a mere 1.8% of the $69 billion digital ad market in the US. Yahoo has about 3.4%. Google and Facebook together claim about half of it. Looked at another way, though, there’s plenty of market share to steal, which can’t be said of its traditional business. 
 
 This story was updated at 8:13am ET with information from Verizon and Yahoo’s official statement announcing the deal.
– In its confirmation of Verizon's purchase of Yahoo's web assets, announced Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal describes it as a "remarkable fall" for Yahoo, once valued at more than $125 billion and now plucked up for less than 4% of that—$4.83 billion in cash. A rundown of the deal's specifics, and how it's being reported: Read CEO Marissa Mayer's lengthy letter to Yahooers about the "amazing opportunities [Yahoo will realize] in its next chapter" here. Bloomberg explains what Verizon is and isn't getting: yes to Yahoo's real estate, no to Yahoo's cash and its shares in Alibaba Group Holding. Business Insider reports AOL head Tim Armstrong will likely emerge as CEO of an AOL-Yahoo combo (Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015). It issues a warning: "The siren song of Yahoo has lured others before him. And Armstrong's desire to revive the struggling internet business may leave him blinded to the same trap as his predecessors." The Washington Post points out the Mayer turned down a deal to buy Yahoo two years ago—a deal Armstrong offered. It looks at what Armstrong, and Verizon, want with Yahoo. In her letter, Mayer writes, "For me personally, I'm planning to stay." It's unclear how long she'll stay for, or in what capacity. In a piece heralding the "saddest $5 billion deal in tech history," Forbes reports Mayer is expected to be handed a $50 million-plus severance package when she does go. Quartz looks at how the deal might allow Verizon to "mount a credible challenge to those two giants": Google and Facebook. The giants own about half the $69 billion US digital ad market. Verizon plus AOL plus Yahoo would claim about 5.2%. Recode profiles Marni Walden, the 49-year-old Verizon exec (and Armstrong boss and "rising star") who drove the deal. The New York Times uses a series of infographics to explain why Yahoo sold itself.