Keep in mind that when a company is being sold the buyer is, almost by definition, the most optimistic of all the parties looking at the asset. So Verizon had some big plan where they could make a lot of money out of it. It was... too optimistic.

I have no idea what Verizon's plan was, but I assume Apollo's plan is to ride Yahoo into the ground, and they've forecast the present value of the revenue vs costs, and it works out.

I left Yahoo in 2011, but back then, profit margins were usually OK but not nearly as good as competitors. Mostly properties were run by small teams but competing ok against much larger dedicated companies. And then there was search; outsourcing it mostly to Bing but keeping a large team and crawling infrastructure to do customizations didn't make sense to me, but it's what happened.

I don't know how much of the small team enabled by corporate stuff + central advertising team still works at Yahoo, if it's still there, maybe there's hope.

I think GP was referring to Tinder as the place where mature stagnant shuffling is occurring.

All they wanted was the advert network. They valued the rest at 0, to be sold off, or shut down. The same with AOL.

OK, I see now that Yahoo is still making money, though it's been declining. They're now at just under 2 Billion in annual revenue. That's surprising!

They look to be little more than a news aggregator at this point, so it's just eyeballs from the inertia of users' force of habit to use Yahoo?

I suppose this gives a "life span" of, at most, a few years before the lights get turned off at Yahoo.

Yahoo Search is a massive search arbitrage business. Look deeper and you'll see a ton of revenue and profit. It's just a grimy business.