CEO Marissa Mayer could leave with $73 million following Yahoo sale

Source: News Corp Australia Network:

July 26, 2016 at 10:54

IT WILL be a long, drawn-out walk to the exit for Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer, sources said — despite her talk on Monday that she was “planning to stay” at the web portal.

The 41-year-old digital diva made the comment in a blog post hours after she engineered the sale of the beleaguered company to Verizon for $4.83 billion.

Indeed, Mayer — whose four-year tenure at Yahoo has been blasted by critics as a failure — is now expected to remain chief executive just until early 2017, when the mega-merger is expected to close, according to the New York Post.
“It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter,” Mayer said.

Nevertheless, don’t expect Mayer to be chilling in the cozy corner office past her expiration date, insiders said.
That’s because AOL boss Tim Armstrong — who sold AOL to Verizon last year for $4.4 billion before engineering Verizon’s latest deal for Yahoo — has his own ideas for Yahoo, sources said.

“All the talk about Tim and her being good friends, that’s total bulls**t,” one insider told The Post.
Plus, Mayer is in line to pocket $A73 million (US$54.9 million) if she leaves after the merger.

Armstrong and Mayer worked together for a decade at Google, and the two have long been cordial, despite Mayer spurning Armstrong’s proposal of a Yahoo-AOL merger in 2014.

But Mayer is “basically an egghead engineer who screwed up these consumer brands,” one former Yahoo exec said.
Armstrong, meanwhile, is angling to turn AOL and Yahoo — two pioneering-but-downtrodden web icons — into an online ad powerhouse to challenge the dominance of Google and Facebook.

The idea, Verizon execs say, is to combine AOL’s superior ad technology tools with Yahoo’s suite of email, messaging and web properties such as Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, which collectively grab more than 1 billion page views a day.

“For Verizon, the transaction makes the company much more important to the digital advertising industry,” Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said, estimating the combined company’s gross ad revenue could be worth as much as $9 billion.

Still, Yahoo and AOL’s combined revenues make up a single-digit percentage of the total online ad market, while Facebook and Google account for more than half of it, according to eMarketer.

Armstrong, for his part, was diplomatic on the subject of Mayer at an all-hands meeting with employees Monday.
“I’d love to keep Marissa doing what she’s doing overall, but she wants to see what the strategy and structure will be,” Armstrong said.

One thing’s for sure: The new “structure” won’t keep her as CEO, and it won’t involve a pay package to compete with the golden parachute she’s due for once the deal closes.

The story originally appeared on the New York Post is republished with permission