LAS VEGAS — What do you get if you add together Engadget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, AOL, Yahoo, Flurry, Verizon and a host of other media properties? A media megalith that, at first, was dubbed “Oath” and, since January, is just plain “Verizon Media Group”.<\/p>\n

As a media proposition, what does a beast with such breadth add up to? Scale, says\u00a0Verizon Media Head of North American Sales & Global Client Solutions Jeff Lucas<\/p>\n

“We’re intending to bring content, data, and innovation with scale to the marketplace,” he says\u00a0in this video interview with Beet.TV. “When we aggregate all of our audience, we rank number two behind Google in terms of total audience.”<\/p>\n

At CES, where\u00a0Lucas was speaking, Verizon and Microsoft announced<\/a>\u00a0an expansion of an existing ad partnership, extending Verizon’s handling of Microsoft’s display, video and content marketing to also include native ads.<\/p>\n

Powering native ads on the Microsoft properties extends the latter’s ad inventory by 20%, the pair said.<\/p>\n

And, of course, Verizon Media Group will need<\/em> to make good ad money. Having spent almost $10 billion to acquire AOL and Yahoo, Verizon in its 2018 Q4 wrote $4.6 billion off the value of its Oath assets<\/a>\u00a0after Oath ad sales under-performed.<\/p>\n

Closer ties to Verizon could help, Lucas says. “When we came together with Verizon, we also came together with Verizon Wireless,” he adds.<\/p>\n