AOL, ‘a financial albatross’
p2pnet news view | Advertising:-Is Google learning a lesson many Net veterans have known since the year Dot —- run like hell from AOL?
“The Mountain View-based company disclosed in a quarterly report filed late Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the 5 percent AOL stake that it bought in 2005 ‘may be impaired’,” says the Associated Press.
Impairment is, “an accounting term used to describe an acquisition or investment that has eroded,” explains the story
Google’s investment in “advertising partner” AOL?
One billion dollars.
“Unless there is an about-face, the acquiring company eventually must absorb a charge on its books to account for the diminished value of its holdings,” says AP, adding:
“Google acknowledged for the first time that it might have to recognize a loss on its 5 percent stake in AOL, whose struggles have made it a financial albatross for its owner, Time Warner Inc.”
Adds AP:
“Google bought its stake in AOL largely to prevent one of its largest advertising partners – AOL – from defecting to Microsoft Corp. The bidding war helped drive up AOL’s implied market value to $20 billion, based on Google’s investment.”
.
.Stumble It!
Associated Press – Google believes $1B investment in AOL is crumbling, August 7, 2008
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August 9th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I’m surprised AOL is sill in existence. Our family started off with AOL, and after repeated problems with their network, we left them for cable internet, and eventually DSL.
I never understood why so many people hated AOL untill I left them to use other sources.
Later I realized the customer support they gave was 100% BS, and the number one popular “fix it” method they recommend is “uninstalling, and reinstalling the software”, which is about the most asinine recommendation to anyone that has already tried that once.
The main problem I suspected was that they use multiplexing to cram too many customers onto a network, making those that already have a 56k cap on bandwidth suffer with less than half of that through their service.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Google is simply another victim of financial-investment advisers that no one can be sure who are working for. Like lawyers and real estate brokers..
In the good old USA, there is no one to be trusted, starting at the presidency the legislature and courts. If the president is allowed to lie so as to start a war, why nor financial-investment advisers.
We are seeing the downfall of corrupted democracy and capitalism.