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Closing This Summer: Verizon To Scoop Up AOL For $4.4 Billion
MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware: We learned this weekend that AOL's dial-up business still has over 2 million customers who pay on average just under $21 per month for service. Regardless of how strange that seems to those of us that salivate over the prospects of gigabit Internet, folks are still clinging to 56k modems are adding millions to AOL's bottom line. However, also recall that AOL has a massive digital advertising platform with a heavy focus on the mobile sector and also owns a wealth of popular web destinations including Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post. With this in mind, it shouldn't be too surprising that Verizon has offered AOL a marriage proposal. Verizon is acquiring AOL for an estimated $50 per share, which brings the total value of the transaction to $4.4 billion. Here are stories from The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR on the proposed sale, which it's worth noting isn't yet final, and is subject to regulatory approval.
Honestly, is AOL worth $4.4 billion? Someone better be doing some proper due diligence on this one.
With annual revenue of $2.5 billion, probably. Seriously, this is something you could have checked out.
After dialup disappeared, AOL had plenty of cash in the bank. So they became a type of venture capital. They bought Huffington Post, Tech Crunch and many others. Since they actually have a lot of web traffic, they started an advertising business.
If you consider that Google and Facebook are essentially ad companies, with ad networks that span far beyond their own website, AOL is another one. Any time you see a video ad on the internet, there's a decent chance it's from AOL (but please use adblock, malware gets into those things).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Honestly, after AOL purchased Time Warner for $160 billion or so of what everybody knew at the time was grossly overrated stock, AOL is not an entity I've kept tabs on.
Google finance is your friend. Any time you want to know if a company is worth their stock price, check out their revenue and profits.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Did I miss something? There is no company called AOL.
Apparently you missed a lot of things. There very much is a a company called AOL Inc which has annual revenues of around $2.3 billion.
Time Warner bought them out like 10 years ago.
It was 15 years ago and you have it backwards. AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around. AOL shareholders owned 55% of the merged company.
Is Time Warner the one selling off the AOL branch of products?
AOL was spun off from Time Warner six years ago into an independent company.
If so, this is a Time Warner-Verizon deal.
No it isn't. Time-Warner has nothing to do with this deal.
Given my great distrust of Verizon, I'm seriously considering abandoning/boycotting any site currently hosted by AOL, such as "Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post."
Not really. Don't know about Mac or Win8 but do know about Win7 and the last couple of Ubuntu releases (it's hard to acquire Linux on dial-up). /dev/modem or whatever you have to do this year as /dev seems to be in a permanent state of flux.
Win7 does handle the USB modem fine but the sharing your connection has changed to sharing your connection with another Win7 computer. No more basic NAT like XP had.
Ubuntu doesn't even ship with a dial-up client so ideally you have to figure out what deb you need and figure out how to download it. If your knowledgeable and know how to set up PAP secrets, the chat stuff and how to add users to the dial-up group you should be able to dial in with pon. Unluckily it seems quite broken in recent releases, last time it would dial in during boot and have a good connection which could be shared but I could never re-dial in. Of course you also have to figure out what device that USB modem is and how to symlink it to
My theory with Linux is that all the developers have a good connection so dial-up is never really tested anymore.
Here my dial-up serves ~4 devices so NAT is important and it is nice to auto-dial and hang up after a few minutes of inactivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism