Bargain hunting
Ever since Yahoo appeared to implode with the messy sacking of its former CEO Carol Bartz there has been speculation that the move was made in order to make selling the company easier. But even at its current historically low share price, there doesn't exactly seem to have been a stampede of potential buyers.
Initially there was a lot of speculation around a merger of two ailing US Internet content giants: Yahoo and AOL - not for the first time. The latter too seem to be making a habit of dropping the ball, as illustrated by its mismanagement of the Mike Arrington situation, and it was thought that the two might revive their fortunes through the economies of scale a merger might bring about.
Earlier this week ATD's sources suggested Andreessen Horowitz - which counts the purchase and subsequent sale of Skype to Microsoft among its recent coups - was intrigued by the under-exploited value of the company caused by management, and especially board-level, failure in recent years. Other private equity groups are also thought to be kicking the tyres.
The same site then reported that Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are contemplating an ad-sales partnership that would allow them to fulfil big ad deals by selling traffic on each other's sites as well as their own. And don't forget Yahoo already does the ad sales for Bing.
Now we get a source within MSN - Microsoft's content arm - telling Business Insider that Microsoft is seriously considering buying Yahoo once more. It seems to be thought that MSN is a key asset in helping Bing compete with Google - somehow - and that the addition of another big load of content farm traffic would be a good thing. Rather damningly for AOL, the source says Microsoft considers AOL to be so terminally damaged that it's not even worth looking at.
The chances are Microsoft could get both at a bargain price. Yahoo currently has a market cap of $19 billion, but that includes a 43 percent stake in the Chinese Alibaba group, the sale of which could significantly reduce the eventual cost.
AOL is worth a mere $1.57 billion these days, so Microsoft could even buy both of them if it wanted - and become one of the world's biggest content providers - for a fraction of what it was prepared to pay for Yahoo three years ago. What remains debatable is whether either are worth it, even at a knock-down price.
