For the last few years, some of the web's most long-running tech media publications have been owned by a giant telecom company. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, which meant that websites like Engadget and TechCrunch were under its new Verizon Media umbrella. Today Verizon announced that it's selling off Verizon Media to a holding company, Apollo Global Management. The new organization will go by the old Yahoo name.
While Verizon will keep a 10% interest after the billion deal, this means that many popular blogs will no longer be technically controlled by one of the United States' largest networking corporations. The Yahoo brands are definitely the biggest chunk here in terms of traffic, but there are a few other notable names. Verizon Media has sold off or shuttered many of the blogs under its control, but the ones left and affected by this sale are:
- AOL
- AutoBlog
- Built By Girls
- Engadget
- In the Know
- Makers
- Rivals
- RYOT
- TechCrunch
- Yahoo! (News, Sports, Fantasy, Finance, Entertainment, Life)
There's no mention of Yahoo Mobile in the press release, so presumably it will remain a subsidiary of Verizon. As is the way of these things, you can expect some of those sites to be shuttered under new management, and some might be sold off to other media companies.
That $5 billion price isn't great in terms of mergers and acquisitions: the company spent $4.4 billion on AOL and $4.5 billion for Yahoo, meaning a loss of a little less than $4 billion (not accounting for inflation). The advertising and publishing tech Verizon received might account for some of that, but it's hard to see the company's push into media as anything but a failure, despite the announcement's claim that it had "double-digit growth" over the last two quarters.