The $4.8 billion price tag for Yahoo shows how much the company has fallen since the early 2000s, when it was valued at $100 billion. At that time Yahoo was the internet star. It was the second-most visited site after AOL, which incidentally was also bought by Verizon in 2015. Photo: Reuters
Yahoo, which stands for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle, was founded in 1994 by two Stanford University graduates, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally called it ‘Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.’ The Yahoo.com domain came in to existence in January, 1995. Photo: AP
In 1996, the company made its initial public offering (IPO). And by the turn of the millennium, Yahoo's stock prices were at an all-time high. It acquired many Internet companies such as Four11 and Viaweb in the initial years. Though it survived the dotcom burst of 2001, its share price hit an all-time low during this time. Photo: AP
With Google's search gaining traction and powering the world wide web by the year 2000, Yahoo could only play catch up. Around this time, it missed out on an opportunity to buy Google. By 2004, Yahoo launched its own search engine, by which time Google was already miles ahead of the rest in the game. Photo: AP
In 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo at $44 billion. The latter rejected the bid as it was "substantially undervalued.” In the next three years, Yahoo's market valuation gradually dropped to $22.5 billion. In 2008, the early internet star started to fade. Photo: AFP
The bright spot in Yahoo's journey since its slow decline in the 2000s is Alibaba. In 2005, the company invested $1 billion in the Chinese e-commerce site. It continues to hold a stake of over 32% in Alibaba. In 2015, the e-commerce giant enabled online transactions of $248 billion, which is more than eBay and Amazon combined, according to The Wall Street Journal. Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo will not include Alibaba. Photo: AP
Marissa Mayer, a Google veteran, was brought as the CEO of Yahoo in 2012. Under her, the company revamped to acclimatise itself to the ever-changing social media platforms and make a fresh appeal to young people. Its acquisition of Tumblr was a result of this revamp. Photo: AP
Yahoo's continued to face an identity crisis in a world dominated by mobile phones and it showed on the numbers. Last year, it incurred a loss of $4.4 billion. The sell-off wasn’t unexpected. Upon the sale to Verizon, Marissa Mayer, said: "Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL." Photo: AP
Published - July 26, 2016 06:05 pm IST