Verizon nears deal to acquire Yahoo
It&#x27;s now being reported that Verizon and Yahoo are exclusively negotiating. That&#x27;s as close as anyone has gotten since Microsoft made an offer years ago.<p>Verizon is really doing a big transition with this acquisition and their AOL acquisition. They&#x27;ve acquired alot of valuable web space to put adds on&#x2F;monetize. This is a probably good news for Yahoo employee&#x27;s as Verizon then has a vested interest in keeping the company running and not splitting it up into pieces like a PE firm may be more inclined to do.<p>The one interesting thing I&#x27;ve heard is that Verizon isn&#x27;t interested in Yahoo&#x27;s patent portfolio, which means it could still be up for grabs.<p>Hopefully its bought by a Microsoft&#x2F;Google consortium and very liberally cross licensed rather than a private equity firm who will look to more aggressively monetize it.<p>I also heard that Tim Armstrong, formerly of Google with Mayer will lead the combined AOL&#x2F;Yahoo company, which means that Mayer probably isn&#x27;t coming along as part of this deal. I think most people expected this.<p>If this ends up going through for the reported 3.5 billion, then Verizon has bought a significant portion of traffic on the web for roughly 8 billion (AOL was acquired for 4.4 Billion).<p>This could end up looking like a very good acquisition in a few years!