Verizon and Yahoo are set to announce an exclusive $5 billion deal

Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to pay $4.8 billion to acquire Yahoo Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter, ending a drawn-out auction process for the beleaguered internet company.

The price tag, which includes Yahoo’s core internet business and some real estate, is a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer that once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion at the height of the dot-com boom.

For New York-based Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build. The deal is expected to be announced early Monday. Verizon plans to keep the Yahoo brand, according to a person familiar with its plans.

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Verizon is building a portfolio of online content and aiming to monetize it via advertising. Its current assets include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which it acquired in last year’s AOL deal, and its own mobile video app, called go90. Acquiring Yahoo will bring in millions more viewers from Yahoo sites like Finance, Sports and News.

Verizon also hopes to plug data derived from smartphones into AOL, and now Yahoo’s, digital advertising systems, and it is aiming to build a competitor to online advertising giants Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

But a combined Yahoo and AOL would be far outpaced by its now far-larger rivals.

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