The sale of Yahoo to Verizon for $4.83bn (£3.62bn) marks the end of a period of intense speculation and ferocious investor activism at the embattled web company. Andfor the past four years, CEO Marissa Mayer has borne the brunt of that protest, while attempting to turn around Yahoo’s fortunes.

Yahoo’s years-long profits slump was made worse by bad investments that came to a head at the beginning of 2016 when the company reported a $4.4bn loss. Expensive gambles, such as the $1.1bn acquisition of Tumblr in 2013, came to epitomize Mayer’s bold but ultimately doomed attempt to reinvent Yahoo as a media platform that would attract younger users and turn the company’s fortunes around.

 
Some of the firm’s increasingly rancorous investors had consistently complained about Mayer’s leadership and in March 2016 some at Starboard Value, an investor in the company, called for the entire board to be replaced. Mayer’s hiring in July 2012 was heralded as a coup for the struggling company. Yahoo was in a state of turmoil at the time, having run through four chief executives in the previous four years. Mayer had been poached from a high-profile role at Google, where she had been the 20th employee and was credited with key contributions to many of the company’s most important products. Announcing the Verizon deal on Monday, Mayer said in a Tumblr post: “For me personally, I’m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter.”

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