Well-known brands like Yahoo! Finance and Huffington Post aren’t going anywhere when AOL and Yahoo merge.
Business Insider first reported yesterday that the merged companies will be known as “Oath,” but that moniker is more of a “B2B brand,”AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“We wanted something that would be a B2B name that would connect to all the brands: Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget – all of those brands are going to be the things that consumers see,” Armstrong said.
The names Yahoo and AOL will not be eliminated after Verizon’s purchase of Yahoo goes through, Armstrong said. Instead, Oath will serve as something of an umbrella for all of the various properties.
“Oath is a brand that will start out as a values-based brand, about connecting our values,” Armstrong said. “Over time, if there’s brands we can create around Oath, we would think about that. But the most important brands we have are things like Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Tumblr, Huffington Post.”
Armstrong compared the new branding to a baseball cap: If the hat says "Yahoo! Sports" on the front, it would say Oath on the side. Armstrong also said we'll soon "see something special" on Oath.com, which currently appears to be owned by someone else.
An AOL spokeswoman told Business Insider on Monday that the company has plans to launch Oath in the coming months.
"In the summer of 2017, you can bet we will be launching one of the most disruptive brand companies in digital," she said.
The Yahoo-Verizon deal is supposed to close in the second quarter of 2017, perhaps on or before April 24. After April 24, the parties can seek a three-month extension, but there's also an opening for either party to terminate the deal.