I sometimes thought Yahoo's strategy was to always make the wrong decision at every turn.
They had a lot of big failures...
1.) not acquiring Google
2.) not making their homepage a search box
3.) being slow to broaden out keyword matching & putting exact match bids of lower amounts above higher bids for broader terms (forcing everyone to manage huge keyword lists while making the system less efficient)
4.) over-reliance on search arbitrage partners with rather high revenue share to them (one of the first thing Microsoft did after powering Yahoo ads was to implement quality scores to cram down the revenue sent to lower traffic quality partners) combined with that bid jamming feature where you could bid a penny less than a competitor and have their irrational bids blow up their budgets.
5.) many of their verticals were heavily reliant on being early to market & the core brand halo, which left something like a Yahoo! Travel utterly undifferentiated against a TripAvisor as vertical by vertical was eaten by more focused competitors like Monster.com then LinkedIn in jobs, Match.com in dating, eBay & then Amazon.com in shopping, blogger & wordpress over Geocities, Shopify over Yahoo! Stores, etc. ... Even after the recent stock market slide where Shopify is off by about 1/3 Shopify is still valued at about triple what all of Yahoo! sold for.
I think Verizon writing down the internet media plays was a move by the new CEO to affirm that
their network is their point of differentiation. As AT&T tries to launch a streaming service that competes against Netflix (along with Disney & eventually Comcast & Apple - also competing with YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.), Verizon wants their own stock to be highly differentiated from a media-buying-spree debt orgy sort of debt load that an entity like AT&T faces.
