Sorry, Yahoo. Yesterday AOL picked its newest dance partner and it's not who you'd expect. But then, the former America Online has a bit of a reputation for shaking it up with surprising dalliances. This time, it's Verizon Communications that's ponying up for the once upon a time dial-up darling, plunking down $4.4 billion "with the strategy of building the biggest media platform in the world," AOL CEO Tim Armstrong proclaimed Tuesday morning.
Everybody, it appears, wants to be a media company. (Even Uber and Airbnb.)
The latest brouhaha has been bubbling since early this year. (Alibaba's IPO last year effectively put the kibosh on the rumored on-and-off flirtation between Mayers's Yahoo and Armstrong's AOL.) The deal values AOL at $50 a share—a 23% boost over the company’s average stock price-which certainly pleased AOL stockholders, if not Verizon's. AOL will now become a division of Verizon but with control of its own businesses, which include media powerhouses such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget, plus the increasingly pivotal Adap.tv programmatic kingdom the company acquired for $405 million in 2013.
With the Magic 8 ball (and a zillion stats) showing mobile video and advertising as the future of all things media, the AOL/Adap.tv programmatic ad tech and its juicy relationships with top publishers and advertisers clearly triggered Verizon's interest way more effectively than a vat of Chanel #5.
"The combination of Verizon and AOL creates a scaled, mobile-first platform offering, directly targeted at what eMarketer estimates is a nearly $600 billion global advertising industry," Verizon said in a statement.
Cynics aside, those of us with a long "cyber" history, starting with America Online in the 90's, know that it's never smart to count the behemoth out. While Yahoo's current secret sauce may be its lucrative Alibaba stake and a list of dubious acquisitions, the power behind AOL's enduring brand may be its much-mocked, yet massive audience -- and the company's eagerness to embrace and invest in new tech to attract them.
"The technology they've put together is real and there's a lot of rural left in America," says Laurie Petersen, former Editor-in-Chief of AOL Jobs.
And they do come out by the hundreds of thousands to devour AOL content. This I know for sure as a Contributing Writer for the company with access to killer dashboard stats. Let's put it this way: even today, there are legions more Enthused-Confused Beginners on our planet than there are tech-savvy hipsters sipping Blue Bottle and happily waving their brand-spanking new Apple Watches.
As for Verizon? Verizon's last news/content play was the late not in the least bit lamented tech publication SugarString, which bit the dust last year. The "pilot project" was criticized for not allowing its contributors to write about the hottest topics in the hopper -- that is, net neutrality and surveillance programs.
You know you want to hear this Pavlovian screech one more time:
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