Verizon to Centre Media Arm Around New Subscription Platform Yahoo Plus ⇥ axios.com

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Verizon Media Group, the media division within Verizon, has 3 million people that pay for subscriptions across its portfolio of Yahoo-related products, like Yahoo Fantasy, Yahoo Finance and others, executives tell Axios.

Moving forward, the goal will be to rebrand most of its media franchises as Yahoo products, and to focus on selling subscriptions to those products via a rebranded subscription portfolio called “Yahoo Plus.”

“Yahoo is the future of our consumer facing brand,” says Joanna Lambert, Head of Consumer at Verizon Media.

Good luck with that, is something I am writing only half-sarcastically. Yahoo is a web company with a unique legacy so, partly for reasons of nostalgia, I like the idea of it staging a comeback. But I’m not sure attaching yet another plus sign to a brand that screams “mid-nineties”, now owned by a telecom provider, is an indicator of an innovation renaissance.