On Time Warner’s earnings call today, CEO Jeff Bewkes said the company will split AOL into two businesses: the dying access subscription business and the growing advertising network, Platform A. This comes a day after AOL picked up buy.at, an affiliate marketing network, and a few days after it bought Goowy, a Flash-based Webtop. The Goowy acquisition indicates that AOL is still committed to improving its Website (more pageviews = more advertising dollars). It is just the dial-up access business that it is finally giving up on.
Dial-up subscriptions was long AOL’s cash cow, but revenues last year were down 33 percent to $5.2 billion, from $7.8 billion in 2006. And AOL lost 3.8 million subscribers (there are still 9.8 million). Operating income was actually up a bit to $2 billion for the year because of the growth in advertising.
Bewkes mentioned that the split up would “increase AOL’s strategic options.” That is code for a sale or IPO, or both. Time Warner should sell off the access business to a private equity shop and go full-steam ahead with its IPO plans for Platform A.
(Disclosure: As a former employee of Time Warner, I own stock in the company).
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it is really suprising that AOL still have dial up subscribers.
In the uk AOL internet access died a death and was sold off.
Thus their price plans were good , incentives were good,feature sets were amazing AOL always tried to snare the user with the big heavy software , images being saved on aol image format ( what was that about again ?? ) and when you tried to cancel your subscription was a no no.
AOL single handedly must of sent half the planets stock of CD-Roms.
RIP AOL.
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http://www.xencasino.com
I’d like to see Yahoo! buy AOL [less the dial-up biz which they should sell to United Online]. http://stevepoland.com/yahoo-a.....-the-face/
Everyone knows Steve Case was biggest merger fraud. Timewarner execs didn’t like Steve Case’s idea & plans. They refuse to listen to him and fired him. Losing $99 billion dollars. Some people complaint AOL had spyware and evedropping tools. Steve Case ran away… Start a new company called “RevolutionHealth”. :/
Today, AOL company… tree still never grows. Timewarner exec & shareholders hated AOL. They want to throw it away.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....arch-data/
AOL have two options.
Force Bankruptcy or Sell the company to Yahoo.
@Erick Schonfeld
You WON shares of AOL? Really? *g*
This is something AOL can’t get away with…
I rememeber Techcrunch show us site:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress......it-murder/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....arch-data/
Are you scare?
Of course, you should be…
having -long ago- once worked @ AOL’s member retention dept. (a place more evil than Satan himself) all i can express is the sincere wish that the monster steve chase set loose in the late 80’s finally die.
THE worst consumer product ever bar none (yes even: lead based paint/gasoline/child’s toys, asbestos flooring, cfc based aerosols and metal pellet BB guns)
I have to doubt that under the AOL name they will ever be able to have any credibility again whatsoever.
You people are nuts. Predator site FACEBOOK wished they had as much revenue and profit.
First, you have terrible merger, scandal, and lies.
So sad people who owned AOL shares.
Even AOL AIM chatroom is flooded kiddie porns & Pedophilers: Scroll bots. Meet hot teen, etc…
yikes $5.2 billion in revenue. you can diss the company but even this dinosaur has 50x as much revenue as facebook. i’m not sure their advertising business will ever come close to this. nor am i sure if facebook will ever match it.
where are these 9.8 million people?!? we need to plan some sort of rescue operation…
They’re not going away. Watch out for AOL as they will roar back. Very very deep pockets.
They now own some terrific assets that will be around for a long time, most notably in the ad space: ad.com, Quigo and Tacoda. AOL has value — but they need to get rid of the dial-up business.
Could be a good buy once the dust settles.
Dial up is fast enough, I still run on a 28.8, still trying to save up for a 56k, but 28.8 will do fine for now
I got all my legacy forms on AOL. I’m too lazy to switch them to php.
For those folks who are ranting against AOL, you can’t ignore the revenue the company’s generated, and the users it’s had and those it still has. Yes, the merger was a disaster for Time-Warner and its shareholders, but that doesn’t mean the AOL entity has no value. And there are still millions of people who like the service - both the traditional client-based, and the web-based.
But finding a way for Time-Warner to capture the value of that asset has been way too long in coming imho. It’s interesting to see that the new Exec has some strategy for making this happen. Unfortunately, Yahoo! may be a wee bit too distracted at the moment to be a suitor.
People shoulda seen the writing on the wall as soon as AOL stopped publicly touting its subscriber numbers.
From about 1994 to 2000, every month it seemed they would ratchet up their bragging rights… 10 million…. 12 million… 13 million…. 14 million… 17 million…
Then, all of a sudden, around 2001-2002 the bragging stopped.
I said this was coming around then. I’m surprised AOL lasted in its present form for this long.
Why the hell didn’t AOLTimeWarner merge AOL with Road Runner after the damn buyout of Time Warner thats the question ?
I have been looking for some info on “how to trade currencies”. Now I need to find out mor about “online trading brokers”. Ill keep looking.