Verizon is mashing Yahoo and AOL into a new company called Oath

The next chapter in Yahoo’s strange journey from cornerstone of the early internet to aged Verizon subsidiary is a bold rebranding. After a report from Business Insider first surfaced the news of a potential Yahoo name change, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong tweeted shortly after to confirm the details.

It’s now official: after the Verizon deal closes and the telecom company gains control of Yahoo’s core web assets, Yahoo and AOL will merge to form a new entity called Oath.

Yes, you read that right — if all goes according to plan, your grandparents may soon be logging into Oath Mail and checking the front page of Oath News for top headlines of the day. Twitter users are already taking the name and running with it, because an ill-fated media rebranding is the gift that keeps on giving:

Yahoo originally declined to comment on the possibility of being rebranded as Oath. AOL, however, issued a short statement prior to Armstrong’s tweet saying, “In the summer of 2017, you can bet we will be launching one of the most disruptive brand companies in digital." So we have a time table here suggesting the Oath launch will be in the next few months.

It’s totally unclear if Verizon aims to retain the Yahoo brand in some form. It would of course make a lot of sense for Verizon to keep names like Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News with massive recognition. Then again, you never know what a millennial-hungry old media company is willing to do to blast its ads at as many teen eyeballs as humanly possible.