- by jess nelson, Jun 14, 2017
Now that Verizon has officially completed its acquisition of the fallen Internet giant, what will happen to Yahoo’s once-popular email client?
Verizon closed on Tuesday the acquisition of Yahoo’s core Internet business for $4.5 billion, including Yahoo Mail, Tumblr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.
The ramifications of the Yahoo acquisition have already begun to manifest themselves in the business world. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, resigned from her position Tuesday after the business was officially closed. More than 2,000 yahoo and aol employees, 15% of their workforce, were laid off Wednesday as a result of a merger between verizon’s aol and yahoo entities.
oath, the result of the merger of verizon’s aol and yahoo, is verizon’s attempt to remain competitive in a digital advertising market dominated by facebook and google. The new business entity will be comprised of AOL and Yahoo products, including Huffpost, Aol.com, Tumblr, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance. Tim Armstrong, the former CEO of AOL, will take over as sworn-in CEO.
even amid several security breaches, yahoo mail remained one of yahoo’s most popular applications. It was even ranked as the 9th most popular email client in May 2017, based on a study of over a billion emails opened by Litmus.
given that aol and yahoo are merging, will verizon merge the most popular yahoo mail app with the less popular but more tech-savvy aol mail?
A similar fate befell the 4.5 million verizon.net email addresses that were deactivated in March. At the time, Verizon.net users had 30 days to transfer their email account to AOL, transfer it to another provider, or delete their account entirely. users who chose to transition to aol were able to keep their verizon.net email addresses, but must now log in through aol mail.
chad white, director of research at litmus, predicts that yahoo mail will “live for a long time”.
white says yahoo mail is a completely different situation than verizon.net email addresses.
“Although it has been neglected and tainted by hacking in recent years, yahoo mail has decent capabilities, plenty of brand recognition, and a much larger user base of accounts,” says white. “I’d be surprised if verizon did a forced migration of yahoo email accounts.”
“They will then use that single backend system to service both aol and yahoo email accounts,” says white. “on the surface, they will be branded differently, but under the hood, they will be one system. although verizon says there will be no oath.com email addresses, i wouldn’t be surprised if they did it only once the infrastructure consolidation email is complete, perhaps as part of an effort to meet corporate email needs to match gmail’s success with business users.”