AOL’s revenue and operating income continued to slide as the parent Time Warner focuses on advertising. For the fourth quarter, AOL reported operating income of $274 million on revenue of $1.25 billion. That’s down from operating income of $910 million on revenue of $1.84 billion.
AOL’s results are an interesting sidebar to the
Microsoft-Yahoo saga.
The Microsoft $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo gives Time Warner an excuse to dump AOL. Perhaps Google would buy AOL. In either case, AOL is in play or it’ll become left out of the advertising consolidation. AOL simply won’t be able to compete in online advertising world dominated by Google and Microsoft.
In the meantime, AOL erosion continues. Nevertheless, it is still amazing that AOL still has 9.3 million access subscribers. Who are these people? And why are they paying for what they could get for free?
But I digress. By revenue AOL is just a hair larger than Time Warner’s publishing business. And in the fourth quarter publishing had more revenue. For 2007, AOL had revenue of $5.18 billion, down from $7.78 billion in 2006. On the bright side, operating income was up for the year to $2 billion in 2007 from $1.89 billion in 2006. The results were roughly in line with Wall Street’s expectations. For instance, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen had projected AOL advertising revenue growth of 10 percent and that’s what the online unit delivered.
Other notable nuggets:
~ Revenue at AOL was down 33 percent for 2007 and 32 percent for the fourth quarter.
~ Subscription revenue fell 52 percent due to the sale of AOL’s international access business.
~ Adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization was up 4 percent for 2007.
~ In the fourth quarter that measure of operating income was up 29 percent.
~ In the fourth quarter, AOL had 109 million average monthly domestic unique visitors and 49 billion page views.
~ AOL had 9.3 million U.S. access subscribers at the end of 2007, down 3.8 million from a year ago. Even so losing 740,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter was better than Deutsche Bank’s projection for a loss of 1 million lost subscribers. Who are these people?
The company at the bottom of the customer-service heap is Time Warner's AOL. A remarkable 47% of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." Analysts said that rating may have something to do with its effort to transition from an Internet service provider -- where it still has more than 9.3 million paying subscribers -- to an ad-supported Web portal.
