Tech - News
Here's What Really Happened To AOL
By GARRETT ETTINGER
American Online, or AOL, was the top internet provider until 2000, having over 18 million subscribers. It declined after the dot-com bubble burst towards the end of the ’90s.
In 2001, AOL officially merged with Time Warner for $165 billion to become AOL Time Warner. It was the largest merger in history at that point.
However, the timing couldn’t be worse, as many tech companies were beginning to feel the effects of the dot-com crash that began in 2000.
AOL faced the largest annual net loss of any company in history at $98.7 billion in 2003. By the end of 2003, AOL Time Warner would drop the AOL to become Time Warner.
Steve Case, the AOL Time Warner chairman in 2003, cited reasons such as cultural disagreements and internal conflicts within the company for AOL’s downfall.
However, Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s CEO from 2008 to 2018, believes the decline was due to a lack of adaptation to the market, as consumers were turning to broadband internet.
Verizon officially acquired AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015, and a few years later, the former internet giant was combined with another asset, Yahoo, to form Oath.
While profit projects were high, the new company failed to meet expectations. Verizon sold its Verizon Media division to Apollo Global Management, which would become Yahoo.
AOL is now a part of Yahoo, another household name in the early internet. While far from its heights, the company more or less exists as a part of a larger company.