AOL has been an independent company for a couple of months now and, much like Yahoo, has been looking to shed some unnecessary weight. Among the products put up for sale is one of the two IM services the company runs, namely ICQ. Certainly not as popular as AIM in the US, it has a sizeable following in other parts of the world leading to interest from several groups outside of the US. All Things Digital's Boom Town reports that the bid is now down to four "serious" contenders offering a price around $200 million.

Apparently, there were seven companies interested initially in the instant messaging service which has an estimated 40 to 50 million users worldwide. These have been now cut down to four which come closer to what AOL wanted for ICQ. Still, while $200 million is a decent sum, it's well bellow the $300 million that AOL was rumored to want for the propriety.

And it's certainly a lot lower than the $287 million plus an additional $120 million in earnouts that it paid way back in 1998. Granted AOL was flying high at the time and was valued at several tens of billions of dollars, a far cry from today's value of less than $2.5 billion based on the current trading price of its stock.

Negotiations are now getting closer to an end, though it may still be a while until a sale is announced. The exact name of the bidders is still unknown, but Boom Town reckons they're likely to include the Russian Digital Sky Technologies group, which has invested in Facebook and Zinga and owns Russia's largest social network, the QQ group within Chinese Internet giant Tencent, Naspers, Seznam and possibly Yandex, the biggest search engine in Russia.

It never made much sense for AOL to run two instant messaging services tough the two never really competed since ICQ didn't take off in the US. But as the company is focusing on its core businesses, content creation and its ad network, ICQ seems like an obvious propriety to get rid off.


The still AOL-owned ICQ for Windows is available for download here.