AOL may have to return to its profitable core business - dial-up. Yes, AOL still has millions of dial-up accounts, and those bring in more revenue than the content farms.

Somebody has to serve middle America.

Who modded that down? Look at AOL's income graph. (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnDHPXzCYAAS2Zu.png) AOL still has over 2 million members paying $20 or so a month, and that's where all their profits come from. Their "content" business loses money.

(I didn't mod it down, but..)

I don't think anyone looks at the dial-up business as one thats going to do anything but shrink year over year. Any growth for AOL is going to come out of something thats not as an ISP for dial-up. Content farming consistent with AOL's DNA that makes money and, in theory, is way to see some growth.

Looking at that chart is confusing to me because I can't tell why sometimes their Platform business kills it, and other times its a loser. That seems to be the business to focus on.

> Looking at that chart is confusing to me because I can't tell why sometimes their Platform business kills it, and other times its a loser.

They're making money Q4 2011, Q4 2012, Q4 2013 and to a lesser extent Q3 2013. Looks like it might be Christmas shopping ads.

The voting culture here is toxic, and totally benign posts frequently get voted down for no good reason, and without comment. I see posts complaining about downvotes now in every other thread on HN, and I still haven't seen a mod comment about it. It's getting to be real pain in the ass, and something does need to be done. I'd be in favor of making votes public at this point, the problem has gotten so bad.

The fact that early downvotes are usually canceled out, eventually, does not render the problem moot. It merely makes it a bit easier to live with.

I'm pretty sure there are at least a few bots that are automatically downvoting posts with certain keywords as well, and the accounts for those bots need to be identified and banned.

I have no idea what the breakdown is, but a not insignificant number of AOL's "members" don't use dial-up, but run the AOL client over their cable/dsl connection. That costs ~$10/mo or less.

Crazy, but true...

I'm not sure the majority are middle America. We have a lot of fiber going in with these rural cooperatives offering some pretty good speeds. I get the feeling it is a lot of folks who dropped of the tech train and just want their e-mail.

Have you seen any figures on what percentage of rural households have access to fiber? I haven't, bu I would rather wager that the majority of rural America is on AOL than wager that even any significant number of rural Americans use fiber of any sort. Rural fiber is important, but my parents switched from dial-up to HughesNet, not ResTel.

I've actually been trying to get the stats but they are hard to get. I do know that there is a lot of expansion and we are seeing internet speed & price are lower than Comcast. It looks like either feast or famine. I would also note that AOL did not have 100% coverage. You might remember the lawsuit AOL dealt with 800 number charges. Dialup has holes in its coverage.

A more likely problem for rural AOL is the decreasing cost of Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint wifi run on licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Lots of little players out there with Ubiquiti networks (or similar equipment).

You're joking right? Do you have any idea how much money AOL makes from running their own online advertising network on these content sites? It is not chump change.

Of note from the article is that Huffington Post is not the money-maker it used to be.

I have noticed this from my own browsing habits. I actively avoid Huffington Post if I want anything resembling unbiased or accurate news. More often these days, it seems like they are willing to regurgitate any old blog post or celebrity tweet as a news item. That type of content is a lot less valuable to me (and it seems to others as well) than original reporting and journalism - anything other than "what this celebrity posted to instagram".

Because of the click-baity and rah rah rally the base type of political slant even on mundane of the news, made people to leave Huffington Post in droves.

Interesting that Techcrunch mentions traffic percentage drops of other AOL owned properties like Huffington Post and PawNation, but carefully leaves itself out of that particular paragraph. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a Techcrunch article shared on my LinkedIn or Facebook feed, it feels like TheVerge has done a better job at taking the tech mantle (but that is just my opinion), maybe the people I know just prefer sites like TheVerge instead.

I think Techcrunch needs a little bit of a shake-up to be quite honest. The quality of the articles have been very sub-par for a very long time. I am surprised Shingy hasn't had one of his "brain farts", yelled gibberish for 20 minutes like he usually does and save AOL.

The verge is now more of a culture site than a tech site, they've really embraced the "culture culture" aspect of their motto. Often their tech articles are left wanting while having too many movies and tv shows articles.

I've found that arstech or anandtech offer a lot more with less whining.

I've lost all faith in The Verge after seeing junk about apps like Slack being down, therefore causing the "editors" to not know what to do with themselves. Great journalism.

I'm wondering if Techcrunch will be affected by this. They didn't really mention anything about that. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to such a site.

I doubt it. TechCrunch actually does provide a lot of value. I think the chopping block will be limited to meme-sites like PawNation.

While there are some (to me) big sites rumored to be on the chopping block, I'd literally never heard of several candidates before this article. Am I that out of touch with mainstream browsing habits, or had AOL gone crazy with buying content houses whether or not they had audiences?

Funny thing: I got an offer from Aol last month.

I just learned that AOL was still alive.

Hopefully, Shingy will have one of his "brain farts" and things will get better at AOL.

He must not have solved for the missing human experience, yet.