Verizon has sold its media assets, including AOL and Yahoo, to Apollo Global Management, a large publicly-traded investment firm (details here), CNBC reported on Monday, May 3, 2021 (read story here).
In the internet’s early days, AOL became the most widely used internet access provider, but that subscription business has withered away to only a few thousand remaining subscribers. However, AOL still exists as an advertising-supported content site (here) and email platform, as does Yahoo! (here), and millions of people continue to use AOL Mail (I’m one of them). Those aren’t the most popular email providers, though, even though both offer free email services; Gmail (owned by Google) is, by far (see data here). But even stacked up against their latter-day competitors, they seem to work just fine:
“The only real downside of having an AOL address now is the snickering from millennials who routinely assume that Grandpa is too dumb to use Gmail,”
according to one user (story, along with some history, here).
The question now is, will AOL Mail go away? The new owners obviously aim to make money from their multibillion-dollar investment in Verizon’s media assets, and they will take a gimlet-eyed look at its return value. But one tech expert says, “There’s really no cost for them to keep that part of the business up and running,” and if it produces advertising revenue, why wouldn’t they?
But whether AOL Mail sticks around will now be up to the AGM folks, and they haven’t said anything about it. One of my favorite AOL features, its stock portfolio tracker, is already gone (it was shut down in January 2019), and as one of those “Grandpas” who likes and still uses AOL Mail, I fear it could be next for the chopping block. I hope not. But if it, too, goes away — there’s always Gmail.