Sources say Verizon spent about $1.2B on the failed go90, including the purchase of OnCue and Vessel, in an effort without clear market research
Why VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger May Be the Big Winner in Dell's Reorg Jeff Baumgartner / Light Reading : Verizon's Go90 Shakes Hands With Eternity Tweets: Carlos Pacheco / @carlospache_co : It's absolutely mind boggling that there was no real research and insights on who the audience they were going after. Just a build it and they will come mindset. Old school media in a nutshell. http://digiday.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The $1.2B figure closes the loop on a three-year arc that related coverage has tracked piece by piece: Verizon's stated ambition to build a multi-billion dollar media business to challenge Netflix and its vying for Yahoo (inside Verizon's media push), the AwesomenessTV stake bought to feed go90 with short-form video, and the 2015 launch that stumbled despite $200M+ in programming because of discovery problems.
The middle of the arc already showed distress — 155 go90 employees laid off in January 2017 with the newly acquired Vessel team handed the rebuild — followed by April's restructuring into three units under former Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg. What today's report adds is the total bill and the diagnosis: sources say there was no real audience research behind any of it.
First-order effects
- Verizon's media leadership owns a documented ~$1.2B write-down narrative spanning the OnCue and Vessel purchases plus programming spend, just as the Vestberg-led structure has shifted corporate priority back toward network and technology.
Second-order effects
- The failure undermines the strategic case for Verizon's remaining content bets — the AwesomenessTV partnership and the Yahoo acquisition push were both justified as feeders for go90's audience, and that rationale no longer holds if the audience was never defined.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carrier-built media platforms assembled through acquisition rather than market research become the sector's cautionary template, accelerating the retreat of telecom operators from original-content ambitions toward distribution and network businesses.
The trend: Telecom carriers' acquisition-driven entries into consumer media are collapsing under the absence of audience research, pulling operators like Verizon back toward network-centric strategies.