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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
Lucky for Verizon, AOL's 56k isn't that much slower than their supposed "broadband" DSL.
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."
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; }
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."
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch...
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.
So you're basically just bloviating. Fair enough/
"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.
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."
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.
At the time that was happening everybody was like "wait, Time Warner has publishing, TV, print media, movies, and AOL has ... email?".
At the time, I was thinking AOL only thinks of the Internet as "content" rather than a global interconnected network. And it's become even more true today to the average consumer. Buying a content company is a lot more logical than you would think - but they were a bit early, considering they had dial-up to work with.
I was an employee at the time and you partially hit the nail on the head there.
Steve Case was by far the best CEO I've ever worked under. Both naturally charismatic and a strong long term vision. As far back as the Q-Link days he never wanted to be a service provider or a technology company. He wanted to create a new medium for people to get their content and us buying TW was supposed to be the realization of that idea.
Unfortunately Steve had no idea what he was getting into going up against the entrenched old media execs and his allowing them to retain some control was AOL's undoing.
At the time of the purchase teams at AOL had developed working POCs for streaming music and video delivery that worked with minimal buffering at 19.2k while retaining good quality (of course that was before HD took off). What Apple did with the iTunes store we had done long before. All we needed was the keys to the TW media kingdom and the digital media landscape would have looked a lot different. We all know what old-media thinks about digital content though...
Steve's last misguided act in the saga was to sacrifice himself to get Ted Turner out, but there was no one that ever replaced Steve's drive and passion and TW took more and more control.
Contrary to gstoddart's uneducated understanding of things, AOL was the only profitable (mostly due to the dialup income) portion of TW after history had been re-written. TW bled the money out and into other money pits until there was nothing left and they finally let AOL go.
AOL always got a bad rap and many of my co-workers were afraid to admit they worked there. It was a good company that filled it's role very well. It was never a service meant for those with technical ability. It was meant for those that barely wanted to know what a computer was and it served them very well. It saddens me still how things turned out and that they've fallen into typical flailing around that many companies seem to do these days when trying to chase short term profits.
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.