14 DAY TRIAL // AOL is on the verge of a long-awaited spin-off from Time Warner and will officially begin trading as an independent company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) later today. Shares have already begun trading, but AOL will officially be on its own in a few hours as the market opens. It's been a crazy decade for the company which was its worth drop massively, but it's now looking at the future and growth as content company with its eyes set on every niche market possible.
It marks the end of one the most tumultuous mergers in corporate history. It began almost ten years ago, at the height of the dot come bubble when AOL was riding high on its dial-up business and online proprieties. It was the biggest thing on the Internet at that moment and old media, Time Warner, wanted a piece of the seemingly never-ending pie. AOL was valued at $165 billion at that time, more than Google today, making the merger one of the biggest in history as well and the combined value of the newly formed AOL Time Warner giant was at $240 billion.
It didn't take long for frictions to begin between the execs at the two companies and coupled with the burst of the 'bubble' a very short while after that, it soon became apparent that it would be one of the biggest disasters in the history of mergers as well. Today the two companies have a combined value of less than $40 billion. AOL is valued at just $2.5 billion after many, many cuts and we'll have to see if even that wasn't overestimated depending on the market's reaction to the newly issued shares.
Still, the company is profitable at the moment, though revenue from its dial-up business, which, surprisingly or not, is still around, is dwindling and will have to be replaced by advertising revenue, something in short supply lately. AOL plans to ramp up content creation and has beefed up its editorial team with a lot of new hires. At the same time AOL is letting 2,500 people go as it tries to loose weight fast. It will be interesting to see if the latest plan to fill the Internet with 'targeted content', similar to what Demand Media and others are doing, very successfully it seems, will be enough to save it, but with Tim Armstrong at the helm AOL might just make it as long as it keeps its bearings straight.