Lord have mercy, you guys lack foresight if nothing else. Do you know how much these advertising platforms are worth in revenue? Google made over 7 Billion dollars on it's search, display, and advertising revenue in Q1 2017. Do you know who Google's number one competitor is, now that Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo? Verizon. The fact that you can't see the product is not an indicator of its worth.
I'm not even trying to justify the layoffs. Verizon makes over $4 Billion in profit in a single quarter (PROFIT). They can buy AOL and Yahoo and not even feel it by the end of a fiscal year. The layoffs are a product of automation and technology. Take the retail operations staff, for example. Retail stores had two people on salary doing nothing but checking in inventory and performing operational upkeep- while they had three-to-five managers just for sales, and a ton of reps overpaid and under-utilized. They rolled out the SAP inventory system, shifted the now streamlined responsibilities to the more than capable and available hands of managers and reps, and laid off the operations staff. You can apply this story to every division, and it's going to continue. Spend an evening researching job loss predictions at the hands of technology and automation.
The layoffs aren't because Verizon is hurting. It's because technology is creating redundancy in staff, and no business is going to keep staff that is redundant. That's just silly. Have a look at T-Mobile's structure. Bare bones. They stay out of the light when it comes to this stuff because they never had the excess in staff. They've been running skeleton crew because that's all they could afford, and now technology has caught up to the point that it's all they need.
Reposted from @QnQ68BR-1pst, excellent comment.