Is Jason Calacanis Up for Sale?
An article in yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph is headed, “AOL chief says Time Warner demerger ‘becomes interesting’ “. Note this is the AOL chief, Jonathan Miller, speaking, not Time Warner’s, who has already dropped AOL from its corporate branding.
In a further deconstruction of the dotcom era merger, the UK part of AOL has been sold to a precocious startup called The Carphone Warehouse for £370 million ($692m), and the French and German businesses have gone the same way.
For those of us in the Bl*g Network space, the big question is what now happens to Weblogs Inc, Jason Calacanis’s blogging business bought up last year by AOL on the expectation of moving from ISP to content business — which was also the intention of the tieup with Time Warner?
Miller believes AOL will be swallowed up before the ink is dry on the demerger papers. By whom, and why, we may well ask.
One thing’s for sure, being a content company bought by a mainstream giant in these uncertain times may not be the bed of roses it first seems.
Any search engine would love to get their hands on AOL. It would put them in front of hozilions of people, not to mention give the search engine access to actual behavior patters through AOL’s ISP logs. They’ll be able to see who clicks on what ads, how long they visit a page for etc. If someone does buy them, I’d probably go with Google first and MS second. Yahoo might be another good option.
By chrispian on October 23rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
You could be right, Chrispian. AOL has certainly been attractive in UK, France and Germany.
By John Evans on October 23rd, 2006 at 6:39 pm
[...] Interestingly, that leaves both Netscape and Weblogs Inc back at the ranch. Unless, of course, Jason has done a deal on WIN. See also our post on a recent statement by Miller about a possible sell-off of AOL by Time Warner. [...]
By » SYNTAGMA - the home of Syntagma Media on November 16th, 2006 at 10:41 pm