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Verizon Communications Inc.'s planned $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc. deepens the nation's largest wireless carrier's investment in digital media but hands it a troubled company in need of restructuring.

By combining Yahoo's content and its one billion monthly active users with Verizon's 110 million customers, executives from both companies said the transaction would help Verizon achieve its goal of increasing its global audience to two billion users and $20 billion revenue by 2020.

Acquiring Yahoo will bring in more viewers from Yahoo sites like Finance, Sports and News. The carrier also will gain the rights to royalty payments from Yahoo Japan worth tens of millions of dollars annually. But it will also assume about $1 billion worth of employee stock-based awards.

The deal "takes us from being millions in terms of audience to billions," said Marni Walden, Verizon's head of product innovation and new business, who will oversee the integration of Yahoo into Verizon. That will help the carrier better leverage the advertising platform it acquired from AOL last year, and accelerate revenue growth in its nascent media business.

Verizon has been building a portfolio of online content. Its current assets include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which it acquired through last year's $4.4 billion AOL deal, and its own mobile video app, called go90. After the Yahoo deal, which is slated to close in the first quarter, it will have spent roughly $10 billion

It is part of a strategy to cope with slowing growth in its wireless business. Rival AT&T Inc. is in the process of developing a streaming video service and spent $49 billion last year to buy satellite television service DirecTV.

While the smartphone revolution was a boon for Verizon and other wireless companies, the bulk of the profits went to Silicon Valley, where tech giants like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. built empires from money made reaching smartphone users who logged in over Verizon's network.

With Yahoo, Verizon is trying to get in on that game, but it is going to have to digest a company that multiple leaders were unable to fix. That task will land on Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive who joined Verizon after selling AOL.

Shares of Verizon fell slightly, down 0.7% to $55.70 in midday trading; Yahoo shares declined 2.6% to $38.37.

The deal will cost Verizon about four months of free cash flow, according to analysts at Nomura, who said the challenge will be for the phone company to "execute crisply" on its new media strategy.

Revenue at Yahoo—minus commissions paid to partners for web traffic—fell 19% in the second quarter, the sixth decline in the past seven periods, and its loss grew to $439 million because of a large write-down of Tumblr. It has been laying off its employees ending the second quarter with 8,800 employees, its smallest head count in years.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she would stay on with Yahoo to oversee the transition. "I love Yahoo, and I'm excited to see it into its next chapter," Ms. Mayer said Monday on a conference call.

Verizon wants to own digital content that it can sell advertising against. It is planning to combine consumer data collected from smartphone users to deliver targeted ads to users tuning into its online properties.

Ms. Mayer said the combination of AOL, Yahoo and Verizon would create "the illustrious 'must buy'" in digital advertising.

But Verizon will still have more to do. Combined, AOL and Yahoo collect only about 2% of the global digital advertising revenue, compared with Google's 31% and Facebook's 12%.

"We think we've got work ahead of us," Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdam said in an interview, but putting AOL and Yahoo together "brings you the scale you need."

Write to Ryan Knutson at ryan.knutson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 25, 2016 14:45 ET (18:45 GMT)

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