Wow, I didn't even know AOL had 75 cents, let alone $315 million.
Arianna Huffington will also be put in charge of all AOL content.
I like how when these things happen the acquired company execs/founders always talk about how it fits their big plan and how great it is. I wish just once they would say something like "look, they offered us a ton of money and we couldn't pass on that."
It might be seen as a bit cruel to the new owners if you said, "They offered us way more money than the company is actually worth, so we took it."
Yabuttt.... This is AOL. After the Time-Warner thing, I'm sure they'd understand.Originally Posted by lesslucid
Seems like Huffington Post would be worth more than $315 million dollars.
Well, at least it was a site network that I already pretty much ignored. I never cared one way or the other about their political coverage, but their attempts to speak to anything health or science related were painful and they're a blight upon the Earth in that regard, and I guess that's not going to get any better any time soon.
What's very funny to me about this is just how conservative--and I mean NewsMax conservative--AOL's editorial slant has been over the years, and how this fits in.
When I first moved to VA, I had a roommate who worked at AOL, in the web and web frontpage part of the company. He ended up on the team who do the content there, and these were folks who--at a party at our house--seriously discussed how much they wished Dick Cheney would run for President after Bush's term ended. Since that time, I've been acutely aware of AOL's slant on especially political news.
I don't fault them for their conservative take on things by any means. Said roommate got me a free dialup AOL account (broadband didn't come to the Sterling, VA neighborhood around the AOL HQ campus until mid-2003, hard as that is to believe) back in the day, and even after canceling that the utility of having a good spam-magnet email address caused me to keep my old login just so I would have it around. AOL knows their audience and the "news" they present on their frontpage is geared to them--lots of stuff on the level of People Magazine news (and if you wanted to say "lots of stuff geared at folks who have to have the jokes on "Hee Haw" explained to them, I would laugh right along with you.)
So perhaps the obvious marketing to the declining userbase who discovered AOL by actually using those ubiquitous CD's from years ago as their main form of internet access is finally being seen as a hindrance to the AOL revenue model. In any event, it's kind of interesting to see them go from lowest-common-denominator lunkhead conservatism to lowest-common-denominator lunkhead liberalism.
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