Verizon, which has been the leading horse out of five bidders to buy out Yahoo!, is said to be finalizing its acquisition of the multimedia company for $5 billion.

A source to Bloomberg said that we should see the deal announced in a few days. Verizon would be getting all of Yahoo’s real estate and internet assets. Intellectual property will be going to a separate buyer.

With this move, Verizon will expand its already-rich content bay — it picked up Engadget from its AOL acquisition, after all — with gains of Flickr, Tumblr, a stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba and the Yahoo! News division. It will also have access to more and better ad vendors.

“This will expand Verizon’s advertising base by 200 million more visitors,” said Roger Entner, analyst with Recon Analytics.

Last week, Sprint’s owner, SoftBank, bought out UK-based processor giant ARM for $31 billion.

Source: Bloomberg