Verizon Gets Winning Bid For Yahoo; Apple's Outlook May Be Improving

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Bronze Star

Verizon has secured the winning bid for Yahoo’s core business with a nearly $5 billion offer, Bloomberg reports. The telecom giant will add Yahoo’s tech stack, its 280 million email accounts and a struggling (but still huge) portfolio of media properties. Between AOL and the expected Yahoo deal, Verizon has recently dropped almost $10 billion to assemble the assets to challenge Google and Facebook in digital advertising. If the sale goes through, Verizon will pass Microsoft to become the third-largest digital ad seller, but its projected 4.4% of the overall market would still trail far behind Facebook (17.2%) and Google (35.7%). “Google and Facebook are the gold standards today, but they will start to hit their own limitations,” Harvard biz school prof Rosabeth Kantar tells Bloomberg News. “No one remains on top forever.” More.

Apple-Picking Season

It’s been an unusually rocky 12 months for Apple – its stock dropping from over $130 last July to under $100 this year – but things may be looking up for the world’s biggest company. Apple will add upward of 8 million smartphones in the US market, according to eMarketer, and is growing its market share in both the US and UK. Apple growing overall market share is a real achievement, considering that the high price points on Apple phones cut off a big chunk of potential subscribers. Even more importantly, though, Apple is figuring out how to squeeze more revenue from iOS users and App Store customers (who already spend about 10 times more than Android/Google Play Store buyers).

YouTube Down Under

WPP is “cooling its relationship with YouTube’s Australian operation after the return on a major investment did not live up to expectations,” reports The Australian. GroupM will decrease its upfront investment in YouTube in Australia. It’s not like GroupM will say “no” if a client wants YouTube, but GroupM “has briefed rival media companies to propose alternatives to YouTube.” More.

It’s A Live One

ABC News saw 11.5 million viewers from its Facebook Live stream over the 4-day Republican National Convention. As Facebook’s exclusive streaming partner for the convention, ABC produced over 35 hours of video content specifically as a side-along play to its live broadcast, including recaps, shots from inside the convention and info to support live panel discussions. TV still dominated overall viewership, but this is one way digital and broadcast can be greater than the sum of their parts. More.

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