Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017. pic.twitter.com/tM3Ac1Wi36
— Tim Armstrong (@timarmstrongaol) April 3, 2017
"In the summer of 2017, you can bet we will be launching one of the most disruptive brand companies in digital," an AOL spokesperson tells Business Insider sounding truly ridiculous. And if, as that publication first reported, Verizon's idea is to do away with the Yahoo and AOL brands completely as part of Verizon's deal acquiring Yahoo, combining them into a single new company, that would certainly qualify as "disruptive."
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong confirmed the news, which appeared to leak early, in the above tweet announcing the curious new name by which AOL-Yahoo will be known: Oath. Tronc, it seems, was already taken, and if you would like to make or read more jokes about this new name, Twitter is awash with them.
What will this new company do besides own a bunch of generic portal pages as well as Flickr, HuffPo and a whole lot of Tumblr porn? Who knows!
In January, an SEC filing revealed that the aspects of Yahoo not being sold to Verizon — a $36 billion stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, for example — would be renamed Altaba Inc. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer won't be working at Altaba, and sources tell Recode that she won't continue with Oath, either.
Marni Walden, the executive vice president and president of product innovation and new businesses at Verizon's AOL, will preside over the merger with Yahoo. Verizon will get Yahoo's search, mail, content, and ad-tech business components, leaving news and perhaps other components to merge with AOL and form Oath. Business Insider writes that "It's unclear if the Yahoo name will live on for any part of the internet business that will be run by AOL" and expects a big advertising push behind Oath in the coming weeks. Everyone prepare yourselves.
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