Why Verizon Decided to Still Buy Yahoo After Big Data Breaches – WSJ (Feb 21, 2017)
There was some reporting around this last week, though with several different figures for the discount on the original deal price, so I decided to wait until the new agreement was official to comment on it. The $350 million discount is not actually all that significant, which likely reflects the fact that security breaches like this don’t end up having all that much long-term impact on customer satisfaction or usage. It’s interesting that the two companies will split the cost of any future fallout other than SEC and shareholder investigations and lawsuits – I would have thought Yahoo would have picked up the tab for all costs relating to the breaches, but I guess it must have balked at that. Ironically, now the big question once again becomes whether Verizon can actually craft something compelling out of these various bits of yesteryear’s Internet. Verizon is said to be aiming to go head to head with Google and Facebook, which is a real stretch when it comes to well-targeted advertising, and I’m still very skeptical that these assets combined can ever be more than a second tier player in the online advertising market.
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