Time Warner Inc., announced that they will be splitting AOL’s dial-up Internet and advertising business into separate divisions by early 2009. This announcement follows major budget cuts to AOL’s blogging properties as well as complete cuts of some of AOL’s products including; Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures, according to an internal memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL’s EVP.
The split is said to ease Time Warner’s ability to offload AOL to some interested parties. According to some reports Earthlink may be a possible suitor for AOL’s dialup segment, and Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, may be interested in the advertising business.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I can’t see how people are still using AOL. The walled garden of the internet may be crumbling down. I am sure they will sell off the dial-up internet division to some one like Earthlink, People PC or another company still doing dial-up. Even though dial-up is a failing business model even if you are trying to target people in outlying areas because broadband is too accessible.
Earthlink will soon be phasing out their dial-up as well and everybody on it will be forced to upgrade. More than likely around the time television stops broadcasting in analog.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
The closing of Xdrive has sent a lot of us scurrying away to look for better (more viable) online storage solutions. I went with ElephantDrive after reading about it at Black Enterprise here: http://www.blackenterprise.com/cms/exclusivesopen.aspx?id=4332.
Maybe Earthlink will do the same for AOL dial up folks?