Content
By the end of 2014, AOL controlled 0.74% of the global advertising market, well behind industry leader Google's 31.4%. In August 2013, Armstrong announced that Patch Media would scale back or sell hundreds of its local news sites. The DCNF was conducted in advance of the traditional television upfronts in the hope of diverting more advertising money into the digital space.
2015: As an independent digital media company
In a statement, Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari cited AOL's 30 million active users as part of what made the property attractive. In October 2025, Bending Spoons acquired AOL in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion. On May 3, 2021, Verizon announced it would sell 90 percent of its Verizon Media division to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, becoming the second independent incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. In November 2020 the Huffington Post was sold to BuzzFeed in a stock deal. Verizon merged AOL with Yahoo into a new company called "Oath Inc.", which in January 2019 rebranded itself as Verizon Media.
Latest News
By 1996, ISPs were beginning to charge flat rates for unlimited access, which they could do at a profit because they only provided internet access. AOL provided free access to community leaders in exchange for moderating the chat rooms, and this effectively made chat very cheap to operate, and more lucrative than AOL's other services of the era. The program dated back to AOL's early days, when it charged by the hour for access and one of its highest billing services was chat. AOL has a global portfolio of media brands and advertising services across mobile, desktop, and TV. In July 2016, Verizon Communications announced its intent to purchase the core internet business of Yahoo!. On October 1, 2015, Go90, a free ad-supported mobile video service aimed at young adult and teen viewers that Verizon owns and AOL oversees and operates, launched its content publicly after months of beta testing.
Products and services
Kimsey was brought in by his West Point friend Frank Caufield, an investor in the company. In October 2025, Apollo reached a $1.5 billion deal to sell AOL to the Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons. In May 2021, Verizon announced it would sell Yahoo and thus AOL to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, and the sale was completed at the end of August.
This allowed users to use only the applications they wish to use, especially if they do not favor the AOL Browser. One such was No More AOL CDs, a web-based effort by two IT workers to collect one million disks with the intent to return the disks to AOL. Ferrari insisted that AOL software was not even installed on the computer. Under the agreement, AOL would no longer require its customer service representatives to meet a minimum quota for customer retention in order to receive a bonus.
- That same year, Agatha released a charming non-fictional account of her time on the expedition digs entitled Come, Tell Me How You Live, detailing the finer points of life in the Middle East.
- Surprisingly for a single woman at this time, Agatha journeyed alone, meeting plenty of interesting characters along the way.
- After the publication of Ordeal by Innocence in 1958, Agatha and Max visited Barbados for a holiday.
- The dearaol.com campaign lost momentum and disappeared, with the last post to the now defunct dearaol.com blog—"AOL starts the shakedown" being made on May 9, 2006.
At the age of 18 Agatha was already amusing herself writing short stories, which Clara had suggested she do to stave off boredom while in bed with influenza. Agatha attended a girls’ school in Torquay for a short while, but finding that unsuitable, Clara took her daughter to Paris where she spent time in a succession of boarding schools, taking piano and singing lessons and embracing the culture of the French capital. Shortly after her eleventh birthday however, Agatha’s world was turned upside down by the sudden death of her father. When Agatha was five the family’s investments in America were suffering and, in order to economise, they rented out Ashfield and spent some time in France.
After the deal closed in March 1997, AOL launched its own branded search engine, based on Excite, called NetFind. AOL purchased search engine WebCrawler in 1995, but sold it to Excite the following year; the compact camping mattress deal made Excite the sole search and directory service on AOL. In November 1994, AOL purchased Booklink for its web browser, to give its users web access. This is commonly referred to as the "Eternal September", as Usenet's cycle of new users was previously dominated by smaller numbers of college and university freshmen gaining access in September and taking a few weeks to acclimate. From the beginning, AOL included online games in its mix of products; many classic and casual games were included in the original PlayNet software system. Case promoted and sold AOL as the online service for people unfamiliar with computers, in contrast to CompuServe, which was well established in the technical community.
After the company parted ways with Apple in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online. It passed tokens back and forth and provided a fixed-price service tailored for home users. The service was different from other online services as it used the computing power of the Commodore 64 and the Apple II rather than just a "dumb" terminal.
