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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.
$100 for a 56k modem
Not having to talk to Comcast PRICELESS
Though not with AOL. I don't use it often but its simply there as an emergency backup to our unreliable cable broadband service which seems to go down about 1 or 2 days a month with no explanation or apology.
Yeah, this is the same AOL who 'bought' Time Warner when they were massively overly valued in the dot com silliness, using over-inflated funny-money stocks.
Time Warner couldn't puke them out fast enough to get them off their back, because AOL was so grossly inflated in value it wasn't funny.
I sincerely hope from what I've heard of Verizon that they choke on AOL like Time Warner did.
Honestly, is AOL worth $4.4 billion? Someone better be doing some proper due diligence on this one.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
An "AOL Time Warner company" .. oh everything old is new again!! :)
Great! Now I can have dial-up and crappy service rolled into one!
And is still worth *$4 BILLION* apparently.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Net Neutrality rules require carriers to treat everyone's content like everyone else's - you can't throttle or restrict traffic based on who it comes from or where it's going.
However, as I read them, the rules are less clear on what content PROVIDERS can do with their own content. And Verizon just bought (primarily) a bunch of content.
I can't charge extra to carry certain content? Fine. Now I buy the content, and change how it's delivered. I have "Huffington Post Free Edition," with limitations on speed, multi-media content, etc. Then, as an EXCLUSIVE offer to Verizon customers, I have "Huffington Post Express," which is the full site delivered at an actually useful speed. If Time Warner Cable wants to get the "real" Huffington Post (i.e. the "Express" edition) delivered to their customers, they have to license it.
Hey, presto! A world where the network providers actually CAN charge to deliver content preferentially. All it needs is for them to own the content in the first place.
I predict we'll see a lot more of these vertical mergers of content providers and networks, and there will be an increasing wave of "subscribers only" offers in the near future.
...or are they attached to their email address? I have "dial-up" through Earthlink, but only to keep the email address alive.
Lucky for Verizon, AOL's 56k isn't that much slower than their supposed "broadband" DSL.
In other news, 50,000 grandmas will now have to find a new dial-up service.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
AOL and Time Warner split up years and years ago.
Don't remind me of the horrors of WORKING at CompUSA and having to restock that giant aisle of floppy disks every week...
Yes. It was spun off from Time Warner back in 2009.
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch...
:O Why didn't I hear about this?! This is bigger than some stupid celebrity break up and the news media must not have covered it to the point where I'd hear about it.
Some number of those accounts are because people don't want to change their email address. To them it's like changing a phone number that they have had for 20 years - so they pay.
I am not sure how that breaks down - but I do believe that 5 or so years ago, the AOL dialup business was at 30-40 million subscribers.
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.
Does AOL still exist ?? WTF ?
Hey, do you want some CDs? :D
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
AOL is still around because some of us cling to old technologies because they work better. MP3s downloaded from dial up sound warmer than ones downloaded through an ethernet cable. Sometimes it is worth the wait.
Time Warner bought them out like 10 years ago.
You really got your facts backwards. Aside from the fact that AOL has been spun off again, AOL is the one who bought Time Warner back when their stock price could buy a small country.
The US has plenty of infrastructure for electricity and roads. But for plenty of people, low population density is a good thing and they'll gladly trade off not being profitable to a telecom to be able to live in an area where they can easily afford a large home on a relatively large chunk of land.
That said, I'm all for Internet becoming a public utility.
You obviously weren't using these cables. They'll give you the warm, rich sound you've been looking for.
When floppies started going away, AOL started shipping their software on CDs.
That was their downfall. They should have shipped CD-RWs.
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."
Two million on dial-up? One tenth of that would've still made me surprised. USA truly is a third world shit-hole in many ways.
Because some people choose to live in the countryside instead of the city? Or that dial-up might be cheaper and a lot of people don't use bandwidth the way you do? I think you have weird priorities.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I can not understand the leadership at Verizon. They seem to always do the opposite of what they should do.
For example, when the iPhone first came out, Verizon turned Apple down and lost quite a few subscribers to ATT. I wonder if the executive that made that decision kept his job?
More examples:
Red Box deal
Intel TV assets
and now AOL
There never appears to be a coherent thought process. The layoff thousands 3 weeks ago, going to lay off a lot more on May 22nd, yet there is money to waste on AOL. Funny thing is, I will probably be laid off after this year's contract negotiations are over, but my son will start working for Vz in June.
I bet they bag Wireline with the load debt so that Wireless books look great.
Maryland State Motto: If you can dream it, we can tax it.
My thought exactly.
And yet they do, much to the consternation of any IT or tech savvy people who have to work on peoples computers that has that AOL crap software AND the people have Verizon FIOS, Comcast, Cablevision or Optonline and yet they still insist on using that dreadful, horrible, useless AOL software rather than a modern browser like Chrome or FireFox.
You mist have been living in a cave. It was major news 6 years ago.
What place can get dial-up but not satellite broadband?
If you thought cancelling your AOL account was difficult before...
Now you get to deal with the Verizon Customer Retention Specialists!!!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Good thing AOL pissed away $100 billion dollars a few years ago, otherwise Verizon wouldn't have been able to buy them now.
Of course they were never really worth that $100 billion, but it must have been fun pretending they were.
I pay for an AOL account. It's for my Mom in rural Montana. I've tried to explain to her that she can use my Dad's local dialup account, use Gmail, and save me $35/month but they just don't grasp that you can share a dialup but keep mail separate.
I got a letter in the mail from her once. Inside was a funny email someone sent her. She printed it out. Put it in an envelope. With a stamp. And mailed it to me.
Hopefully my own children will put me in a home with I get that way.
There's still probably some substantial revenue coming in from forgotten AOL subscriptions from elderly folks who thought they needed it to access the internet, but probably not 4.4B worth.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
I think there are a lot of AOL customers who don't actually use their service, but for some reason think they need to keep paying to use the internet or to keep their AOL email address. People seem to forget how prominent the AOL brand was back in the day. It was the first internet provider for a lot of people and among the less savvy computer users it wouldn't surprise me if they think of AOL as the internet and something that they need to keep paying for so their broadband connection will work.
Most people who are stuck on dial-up are probably going through a local telco rather than a big-name provider. Up until a few years ago my parents who live in the country were still using dial-up access from the local co-op because that's all that was available. They could have conceivably used AOL, but would have had to pay long-distance charges.
Your mom is ultra hipster! Snail mailing an Email is so meta it caused my mustache to uncurl!
It's not just grandmas. I work for a high-end web dev company in Seattle, and almost a third of my coworkers still have @aol.com addresses. I do too because dial-up is the only option where I live. Plus, it's nice to have had the same email address for nearly twenty years.
You (and they) know you can keep your aol.com e-mail address if you cancel your paid dial-up service, right? I understand you apparently have other reasons to keep it, but...
R.Mo
Satellite costs more than dial-up but provides more use value to the subscriber. Think of it this way: satellite's throughput is a hundred times faster, but it doesn't cost a hundred times more.
btw I realize that the AOL program actually incorporates Internet Explorer but I'm not a fan of IE and pretty much tell everyone to use FireFox or Chrome.
Population density in most of the U.S. is far lower than Western Europe, with much wider spans between cities. You're nuts if you think you can compare. And if people already have a phone line and don't use it much, it's really not fair to include it as part of the price - you just don't get that people have different priorities than you.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Yep, in 2015.
My parents live about 5mi outside a tourist town in rural WI, and their only broadband option is data-capped satellite, and even that was prohibitively expensive until last year. The local Big Telco (VZ) stated definitively that "it wasn't worth the investment" to run the lines and hardware outside of the city limits, and the smaller local telcos don't have the money to do it (a few experimented with wireless and a few other ideas, but the heavy foresting and hilly terrain make stuff like that a challenge).
Meanwhile literally hundreds of resorts and vacation spots can't get broadband. It's demonstrably hurting the local economy.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Excuses excuses. Population density doesn't explain why places like Seattle have such shit Internet - or many other urban areas with similarly shit access, for that matter.
Existing middle-mile routes have plenty of capacity (dark fiber, spare wavelengths or even simply unused megabits, depending on who is selling) available on them, and it's not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things.
The public isn't necessarily asking the telcos to run last-mile fiber to Joe Ruralman's ranch from the nearest town which could easily be 50+ miles away - Joe Ruralman probably has satellite or something - 99% of the public is merely asking for decent access in their town, and if it's a town with more than some arbitrary number - say 1,000 households - there aren't that many excuses that can accurately justify why those households don't have better access.
Especially because in northern Europe (where some countries have lower density), I *can* get fiber to the summer cottage and the nearest neighbour is several miles away while the nearest town is a few dozen miles away, and I can get it with my choice of ISP *because* it [the infrastructure] is a public utility.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Excuses excuses. Population density doesn't explain why places like Seattle have such shit Internet - or many other urban areas with similarly shit access, for that matter.
It doesn't have to in order for it to be true elsewhere.
Existing middle-mile routes have plenty of capacity (dark fiber, spare wavelengths or even simply unused megabits, depending on who is selling) available on them, and it's not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things.
"Terribly expensive" is a relative term - if you're the cable company and could spend the money that would bring faster speeds to 1000 people, or even faster speeds to a million living in a highly populated area, you make the best choice for your company, because as of yet, the infrastructure is NOT a public utility.
The public isn't necessarily asking the telcos to run last-mile fiber to Joe Ruralman's ranch from the nearest town which could easily be 50+ miles away - Joe Ruralman probably has satellite or something - 99% of the public is merely asking for decent access in their town, and if it's a town with more than some arbitrary number - say 1,000 households - there aren't that many excuses that can accurately justify why those households don't have better access.
Of course there are when there's hundreds of cities across the U.S. that have populations of hundreds of thousands or millions, unlike your little "northern European" nation that's as big as Rhode Island. BTW, I didn't say the total population density, I'm saying the U.S. is so large compared to Europe that you must break it down into highly populated (which accounts for 95% of the people) and lowly populated areas. If the companies haven't gotten to that last 5% yet, too bad - it's one of the prices you pay for living in the countryside. The 95% that live in highly populated areas, with few exceptions, has decent internet access.
Stupid sexy Flanders.