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Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Verizon to buy AOL for $4.4B in Cash

Content and distribution are still king.

Fifteen years after AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion in a bold effort to put entertainment and advertising on the World Wide Web, the company that coined “You’ve got mail” is at it again.

This time, however, AOL is the company being acquired, and it is a mobile phone company trying to disrupt the media industry.

Verizon Communications agreed on Tuesday to buy AOL for $4.4 billion in an all-cash deal that will see today’s king of mobile acquire the one-time king of media. The rationale is the same as it was 15 years ago, but the platform is different.

Instead of aiming at desktop computers, Verizon and AOL want to put content and new advertising technology on today’s most ubiquitous computing device, the mobile phone.

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

How many people remember that Verizon started out as Bell Atlantic after the break-up of AT&T?

Anonymous said...

yea thats gonna not be good.
I have had aol email since 1996.
I actually have a name with no letters in it.
I hate gmail.

Anonymous said...

You have a name with no letters in it? What do you use a symbol like Prince?

Anonymous said...

Not good for tech blogs like Engadget. I'm sure they will start to have a lot of pro verizon stuff on there now, as well and anti net neutrality. When CBS bought out CNET they started censoring what CNET was allowed to post if it went against what CBS wanted.

Anonymous said...

No, it didn't.

It was broken up into several Regional Bell Operating Companies, such as Diamond State (which was Delaware) and Chesaeake & Potomac Telephones which was the Maryland region, for example.

C&P Telephone changed their name to Bell Atlantic in the mid 1990's. Then to Verizon in the early 2000's.

ginn said...

VZ came into being when Bell Atlantic merged with GTE. Bell Atlantic then changed it's management practice direction to mimic the sub-par practices of GTE. And voila, that POS company we know as Verizon was spawned.

Anonymous said...

9:10 From Verizons own history:

"What eventually became Verizon was founded as Bell Atlantic, which was one of the seven Baby Bells that were formed after AT&T Corporation was forced to relinquish its control of the Bell System by order of the Justice Department of the United States."

Get your history straight before you comment.