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AOL-Time Warner's Money Pit
ElitusPrime writes: "There's an interesting analysis of the recently released balance sheet net worth of AOL Time Warner. The net worth of the largest media conglomerate on earth has now been slashed by more than one-third. The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the merger never should have happened. But there's some interesting financial analysis to show exactly how bad the merger has been for Time Warner."
The linked article is actually very poorly written, and highly specious in its analysis.
"Save for the monthly subscription revenue, there was nothing much to the AOL business to begin with, as the first mild downturn in the economy has convincingly shown, with advertising revenues from the service having now collapsed in a heap."
Actually, AOL was making quite a lot of money on advertising, and though the online ad market dove after the merger, that doesn't qualify the statement that there was nothing there to begin with.
The whole tone (mocking poetry writing, yapping about black holes, colloquialisms instead of actual business terms, and the overly familiar 'I-you-we banter' show this article to be a sensationalist 'I told you so (even though I didn't) editorial rant, and not an 'analysis' of any kind.
I'd love to find out where the money went, but the only thing this article taught me is that Fox's online news is the equivalant to WB's prime time news.
Kevin Fox
Did you know, for example, that AOL Time Warner, at latest tally, has nearly 13 million square feet of office space on its books?
So what? At 90,000 employees, that works out to an average of 162.5 square feet per employee, including conference rooms, hallways, cafeterias, bathrooms, etc. That doesn't sound like a whole lot to me.