Seven West Media sells Yahoo7 to Oath, with CEO Ed Harrison to exit
Seven West Media has sold its 50% stake in Yahoo7 to Verizon’s Oath.
The transaction, which will be completed in August, will see CEO Ed Harrison, chief finance officer Penny Diamantakiou, chief technology officer Paul Russell, and director of product, Mark Robinson all depart the company.
Yahoo was acquired by Verizon last year, which case doubt over the future of the partnership with Seven West Media
Been on the cards for a long time so no real surprise here. But, with all of the Seven assets removed, what actually remains in Oath ANZ?
Well Yahoo Mail must still be massive…
Well I think that’s the point. SWM reduced the value over the years, taking on some valuable components themselves until the JV is low value. It’s cheap as chips for oath! I suppose reducing headcount massively was always part of the deal.
It’s sad, Yahoo7 had a terrific team. I worked there for 10 years and always loved it.
Removal of the 7News and other content from Yahoo7 makes it much cleaner to merge with Fairfax. smh.com.au gets 7News content and lots of video to monetise. The West Australian gets to syndicate content from the East Coast. Lots of job losses all around.
I was in the room at the old Yahoo office in Pacific Hwy Nth Sydney when the JV was announced with Ryan Stokes, Rohan Lund (at the time at Seven) and Cliff Rosenberg back in 2006. For the Y! staff at the time there was an optimism that it would provide the arsenal to truly compete with ninemsn and become the top of the big 5.
A helluva lot has happened in the last 12 years. Ninemsn – gone. Big 5 – redundant concept. Display advertising – rapidly in decline. Broadcast integration – no longer considered necessary (if anything it’s the opposite). Big sales force – replaced by automation and self serve.
I was at Yahoo! in the mid 2000s as well, and I think this just proves that they all had the strategy completely wrong.
You wonder what would have happened if 9/ACP, 7/Pacific and 10 had focused all of the money and energy they wasted on all of these various JVs into building amazing Web properties, and online brand extensions, where would they be now?