@Shakyamuni 985513 wrote:
Wow Yahoo turned down $44.6 billion in 2008 from Microsoft and lost $4.4 billion last year so honestly they must have seen the bottom falling out and sold it for what they could get, but I suspect folks with lots of shares or prestigious positions within the company are retrospectively wishing they’d taken the cake that Microsoft offered almost a decade ago. [/quote]
That might have even made sense especially with MS moving into the mobile device market around that time as Nokia/Windows phones still have decent cameras on them and until recently using them gained an extra storage allocation on OneDrive (which they are slowly discontinuing) – their phones are quicker to start up and take photos which is useful if photographing cats and other animals that cannot be as easily trained to remain in one place whilst you take a picture!
Quote:
They bought AOL last year who basically only had Huffington Post as far as relevant assets were concerned. Same deal as far as flickr and a few other things is concerned when looking at Yahoo.
I rarely read Huffpost but they do seem to have at least left it alone.
At least its not the British Daily Mail Group who were once considering buying it – although had that happened censorship would be unlikely and problematic under UK and European law (UK still currently remains in the EU for at least 2 years), when De Telegraaf (a similar Dutch centre-right media organisation) bought the Dutch social network hyves.nl they simply closed it down within months and orphaned all the content.
Not even sure why they bought it in the first place as they must have lost a few million Euros on the deal!
Verizon (even compared to British Telecom which now runs sports TV channels) does appears to be just a telecoms company – presumably their interest in Yahoo and AOL is to deploy their ad tracking tech for stuff to sell to Joe Sixpack and his family in the USA market the techniques they use are illegal in Europe (and likely to be spotted straight away by many Europeans). I do wonder if one reason BNetzA chose them to run their website (rather than Deutsche Telekom) was to “keep them honest”!
Flickr now tends to attract a globally diverse set of tech aware photographers who tend to share carefully curated selections of photos of non controversial subjects, still often use “real” cameras (including high end Japanese compacts and DSLRs) and because of this are less shy about hiding EXIF info which is useful to other photographers. Its users tend to be well educated professionals who still have disposable income for cameras, foreign holidays and domestic travel and are slightly older (other than young people with genuine interests and talents in photography who use proper techniques rather than “instagram” type filters) fairly middle class and often religious but moderate and respectful of different faiths to their own.
Would have thought this is one of the “golden demographics” the marketers are chasing (Google certainly is, especially middle class family units) – maybe thats another reason why Verizon bought Yahoo although they will have to tread carefully to keep this user base who are more privacy aware..
