Google’s Sells Its 5% Share Of AOL & Loses Over $700 Million In The Process

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Time Warner bought the 5% of AOL that Google owned for $283 million dollars.

Its not a very good return for Google.

Back in 2002 its purchased their 5% interest for $1 Billion dollars.

Time Warner, plans to spin off AOL by the end of the year, into a separate public company, bought the stake from Google on July 8 according to filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The price that the company paid for Google’s stake puts the value of AOL at about $5.7 billion including the $850 million is spent to buy social networking site Bebo last year.

AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong told Reuters last week the company will focus primarily on being a Web advertising business.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. jp says

    I suppose google needed the $283 Million more than it needed 5% of AOL. I wonder what will happen with the search relationship between aol and google. When I check my web stats on my sites, alot of my search traffic comes from aol/google.

  2. Rob Sequin says

    What did Google originally pay for that 5%?

    And, what’s up with Time Warner? They have $283million they don’t need.

    AOL sucks, has sucked and will continue to suck until it is a bankrupt company?

    Time Warner is going to be VERY surprised when they try to spin off AOL.

    NO ONE WANTS AOL. I have no idea how it’s a $5billion “web advertising” company. What a joke.

  4. Rob Sequin says

    Yikes. About 25 cents on the dollar???

    Google can certainly afford to hang on to their investment.

    Why would they sell for such a cheap price?

    Oh right, AOL sucks.

    I think Google found that out first hand and must be comfortable getting 25 cents on the dollar because the value is only going down further from here.

    The only person who ever made any money on AOL was Steve Case and some speculative buyers pre-2001. Other than that anyone who touched AOL has been burnt.

    Am I wrong?

    What a joke.

  6. FX says

    AOL was one of the smartest moves Google ever made, next to applied semantics purchase. While in 2002 AOL was already in decline mode, it still had the highest quality of search traffic online. No other source ever came close and will probably never will. Think about it, not only did ALL your users (20m+ users) have a credit card, but they have all made a purchase online … and majority are in the US. Where else can you find a source similar to this one in today’s world? In 2002 AOL still controlled maybe 15-20% of US search traffic. AOL was also the largest syndication partner that Google stole from Yahoo. Snatching AOL from Yahoo has been said many times how it helped Google win search ad game from Yahoo.

    I will gladly lose $700m over 7 years to make tens of billions in return.