Slashdot Mirror
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."
AOL just didn't do enough advertising. Especially on its TW media outlets.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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
Wow, you sure have a bunch of nice buzzwords packed into that short post. But I don't see how any "synergy" is going to turn the AOL unit into a money-making and growing division like it used to be. They are not going to be "out-competing" my local ISP. If they were to start making T-W content exclusive to AOL, they are only going to be choking off the potential for T-W.
AOL made a sweet deal. They turned a vast amount of very perishable stock value into some real assets by buying T-W. T-W was blinded by dollar signs in their eyes. They looked at the (temporary) value of the stock, instead of (real) value of the AOL company.
I know they are not going to shrivel up and blow away or anything like that, but if I was a T-W stockholder I would be pretty pissed off. There were billions of dollars here last time I looked. Where did it go?
I shouldn't be too hard on them though. Tyco, who has nothing to do with the dot-com bubble, and nothing to do with energy trading, and makes and sells actual products rather than just having intellectual property, has dropped in value by 30 BILLION dollars in the last 2 weeks. Think about that: 30 billion dollars that used to belong to stockholders has EVAPORATED in the last 14 days.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
As the leading U.S. broadband provider, Time Warner Cable added 278,000 net high-speed data subscribers this quarter, for a total of 2.2 million. This is an increase of 1.0 million high-speed data subscribers, or 86%, since the same period last year. At the end of the quarter, digital subscribers represented 28% of basic cable subscribers while high-speed data subscribers represented 11% of eligible homes passed.
It looks like they are trying to spin this as a positive, but if we belive this story, they are almost treated as a liabilty!!!
Ok...so exactly how are they going to spin the fallout when they see a mass exodus after they implement these bandwidth usage quotas...it's been discussed before, regardless of their usage, the average user will flee at the first hint of bandwidth usage quotas...
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.