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Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.

AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.

(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)

Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.

So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...

Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace new offerings.

If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than gmail, or something).

One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.

I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.

It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's or Meetup's case.

Anything they touch turns into dark pattern ridden turds.

I honestly wish there was a page with all the products they purchased, so that I can avoid them forever.

Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.

But with 5 trillion dollar companies these days that are "worth" more than the entire GDP of Germany, why not. It's not real. It's just a number on a computer at this point.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.

I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization

From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range of 10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This would mean that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that correct?