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Post written by:

Yves Gassot

Former CEO

A lot of (digital) ink has been spilled since Verizon announced that it would be taking control of Yahoo! (except for its patents and shares in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan), including stories tracing the company’s history, and history of missed opportunities.

The most interesting question in all of these commentaries is the following: Will being part of Verizon equal revival for Yahoo!, even though major overhauls in strategy and management over the past decade did not manage to narrow the ever widening gap that separated it from Google and Facebook in the online advertising market?

Some of the explanations being put forth for the deal include the technologies and content resulting from the acquisition of AOL last year, along with several other deals, agreements signed with studios and sports federations, as well as the launch of the Go90 mobile video service. The additional technical expertise and content will probably allow the newly expanded conglomerate to increase its market share by a few points, but not much higher than 4% to 5% for the online advertising market, which still puts it very far behind the combined 50% share enjoyed by Google and Facebook (and around 70% when looking at the mobile Internet alone). But the future Verizon does have other assets, not least the telcos’ roughly 115 million mobile customers and 20 million wireline subscribers.

Can telcos turn the tide on decreasing revenue with new business models?

Taking a look at another challenge that does not pertain so much to the future of Yahoo! but rather the future of telcos in general. Here is the question: can telcos turn the tide on the growing trend of shrinking revenue with new, more content and advertising-centric business models? Even if Verizon is one of the world’s most successful telecommunications businesses, with remarkably healthy margins, its revenue appears to be on a downwards trajectory due to competition (T-Mobile), a sudden slump in the replacement rate and dwindling subsidies for smartphones, along with cable’s supremacy in the consumer fixed market in the US.

The oft-cited competition from OTT services and players is a questionable argument when we see that the mobile sector in the United States continued to grow up to 2015, well beyond the time when the GAFA quartet took control. While it is true that Netflix, Amazon and Hulu may have a negative impact (cord cutting) on fixed service revenue, the impact is limited given the TV revenue earned by a telco such as Verizon. On the other hand, the creativity and popularity of OTT services, and especially video services, is translating into heavier use of fixed and mobile broadband services, demand for faster connections and a massive increase in traffic. Fundamentally, these are opportunities for telcos to generate additional revenue, even if it does require continual spending on their networks.

When contemplating the delicate equation of how to monetise 4G and fibre access, telcos can seek out complementary solutions in content or by monetising their relationship with customers through advertising and data markets in general. We can substantiate this hypothesis by pointing to the Verizon acquisitions listed earlier, but also the much larger deal orchestrated by AT&T last year when it took control of the country’ second biggest pay-TV provider, DirecTV. But if we stick to only these two operators[1], it could be said (and rightly so) that few other M&A deals are available to them, since antitrust authorities are against any further consolidation in the mobile market.

What assets can telcos leverage to become key content market players?

The first thing that usually comes to mind is telcos’ role as pipes, in other words the suppliers of the technical infrastructure that carries programmes to consumers’ homes. This argument needs to be put in perspective, however, at a time when there is real competition over access and net neutrality rules are being put into place. Still, telcos do have credible assets in two areas.

First, if they are massive enterprises with tens of millions of customers, they can hold their own against veteran TV networks when bidding for TV rights and exclusivity deals, thanks to their ability to amortise their spending both through their subscribers but also through marketing if they enjoy an image boost and increased market share for their core business. Here it is nonetheless worth mentioning that, in terms of economies of scale, the most powerful pure OTT players have an almost global footprint, which gives them a clear edge over telcos.

The second argument in favour of telcos is their relationship with their subscribers, their sales network (and especially their shops), the quality of the ecosystem they provide through user interfaces and network boxes, and of course the information they have that provides them with detailed knowledge of their customers. By way of illustration, we could say that even if Netflix does not need to be listed in telcos’ interface to exist in a national market, it can certainly help. On this second point, telcos have a clear advantage over broadcasters or pay-TV providers that have no return path that would enable them to target customers. It is less of an advantage compared to OTT companies that have managed to develop a model that generates relevant consumer data. Telcos still need to prove their ability to be serious rivals for Google and Facebook in the online advertising market. But it also remains to be proven that telcos’ ability to monetise their data requires investments in content.

To sum up, even if telcos want to complete the tiering and differentiation strategies used to monetise their access products with substantial revenue from content and advertising, they need to be very big (which could also be seen as an argument in favour of cross-market consolidation deals) to stand up to the growing globalisation of the rights market, and find ways to monetise their customer data without losing their customers’ trust.


[1] AT&T and Verizon’s strategies nevertheless warrant a detailed comparison, since they diverge in many respects.