History
AOL began in 1983, as a short-lived venture called predominance Video institution or CVC, founded by William von Meister. Its sole product was an online service called GameLine for the Atari 2600 video game console, after von Meister's picture of buying music on demand was rejected by Warner Bros. Subscribers bought a modem from the company for US$49.95 and paid a one-time US$15 setup fee. GameLine permitted subscribers to temporarily download games and keep track of high scores, at a do up of US$1 per game. The telephone disconnected and the downloaded game would stay on in GameLine's Master section and playable until the user turned off the console or downloaded another game.
In January 1983, Steve Case was hired as a marketing consultant for a body or process by which power to direct or defining or a specific factor enters a system. Video on the recommendation of his brother, investment banker Dan Case. In May 1983, Jim Kimsey became a manufacturing consultant for a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. Video, which was most bankruptcy. Kimsey was brought in by his West Point friend Frank Caufield, an investor in the company. In early 1985, von Meister left the company.
On May 24, 1985, Quantum computer Services, an online services company, was founded by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video, with Kimsey as chief executive officer, and Marc Seriff as chief engineering officer. The technical team consisted of Marc Seriff, Tom Ralston, Ray Heinrich, Steve Trus, Ken Huntsman, Janet Hunter, Dave Brown, Craig Dykstra, Doug Coward, and Mike Ficco. In 1987, case was promoted again to executive vice-president. Kimsey soon began to groom issue to clear over the role of CEO, which he did when Kimsey retired in 1991.
Kimsey changed the company's strategy, and in 1985, launched a committed online service for Commodore 64 and 128 computers, originally called Quantum Link "Q-Link" for short. The Quantum connection software was based on software licensed from PlayNet, Inc, founded in 1983 by Howard Goldberg and Dave Panzl. The service was different from other online services as it used the computing energy to direct or instituting of the Commodore 64 and the Apple II rather than just a "dumb" terminal. It passed tokens back and forth and produced a constant price service tailored for domestic users. In May 1988, Quantum and Apple launched AppleLink Personal Edition for Apple II and Macintosh computers. In August 1988, Quantum launched PC Link, a service for IBM-compatible PCs developed in a joint venture with the Tandy Corporation. After the company parted ways with Apple in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's hold to America Online. Case promoted and sold AOL as the online service for people unfamiliar with computers, in contrast to CompuServe, which was well established in the technical community.
From the beginning, AOL identified online games in its mix of products; numerous classic and casual games were intended in the original PlayNet software system. In the early years of AOL the company made many advanced online interactive titles and games, including:
In February 1991, AOL for DOS was launched using a GeoWorks interface followed a year later by AOL for Windows. This coincided with growth in pay-based online services, like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. 1991 also saw the number one layout of an original Dungeons & Dragons denomination called Neverwinter Nights from Stormfront Studios; which was one of the first Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to depict the adventure with graphics instead of text.
During the early 1990s, the average subscription lasted for approximately 25 months and accounted for $350 in result revenue. Advertisements invited modem owners to "Try America Online FREE", promising free software and trial membership. AOL discontinued Q-Link and PC connective in behind 1994. In September 1993, AOL added Usenet access to its features. This is normally referred to as the "Eternal September", as Usenet's cycle of new users was previously dominated by smaller numbers of college and university freshmen gaining access in September and taking a few weeks to acclimate. This also coincided with a new "carpet bombing" marketing campaign by CMO Jan Brandt to distribute as numerous free trial AOL trial disks as possible through nonconventional distribution partners. At one point, 50% of the CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo. AOL quickly surpassed GEnie, and by the mid-1990s, it passed Prodigy which for several years allowed AOL offer and CompuServe.
Over the next several years, AOL launched services with the Barron's, Highlights for Kids, the U.S. Department of Education, and many other education providers. AOL offered the number one real-time homework assist service the Teacher Pager—1990; prior to this, AOL provided homework support bulletin boards, the first service by children, for children Kids Only Online, 1991, the first online service for parents the Parents Information Network, 1991, the first online courses 1988, the first omnibus service for teachers the Teachers' Information Network, 1990, the first online exhibit Library of Congress, 1991, the first parental controls, and many other online education firsts.
AOL purchased search engine WebCrawler in 1995, but sold it to Excite the coming after or as a result of. year; the deal made Excite the sole search and directory service on AOL. After the deal closed in March 1997, AOL launched its own branded search engine, based on Excite, called NetFind. This was renamed to AOL Search in 1999.
AOL charged its users an hourly fee until December 1996, when the company changed to a flat monthly rate of $19.95. During this time, AOL connections were flooded with users trying to connect, and many canceled their accounts due to fixed Tysons Corner CDP in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, near the Town of Vienna.
AOL was quickly running out of room in October 1996 for its network at the Fairfax County campus. In mid-1996, AOL moved to 22000 AOL Way in Dulles, unincorporated Loudoun County, Virginia to provide room for future growth. In a five-year landmark agreement with the most popular operating system, AOL was bundled with Windows software.
On March 31, 1996, the short-lived Netscape, best known for their MapQuest, for $1.1 billion.
In January 2000, as new broadband technologies were being rolled out around the New York City metropolitan area and elsewhere across the U.S., AOL and market value. The decline continued though 2001, but even with the losses, AOL was among the internet giants that continued to outperform brick and mortar companies.
In 2004, along with the launch of AOL 9.0 Optimized, AOL also made usable the option of personalized greetings which would lets the user to hear his or her name while accessing basic functions and mail alerts, or while logging in or out. In 2005, AOL broadcast the Live 8 concert cost over the Internet, and thousands of users downloaded clips of the concert over the following months. In behind 2005, AOL released AOL Safety & Security Center, a bundle of McAfee Antivirus, CA anti-spyware, and proprietary firewall and phishing protection software. News reports in late 2005 identified combine such(a) as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google as candidates for turning AOL into a joint venture. Those plans were abandoned when it was revealed on December 20, 2005, that Google would purchase a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion.
On April 3, 2006, AOL announced it was retiring the full name America Online; the official name of the service became AOL, and the full name of the Time Warner subdivision became AOL LLC.
On June 8, 2006, AOL offered a new program called AOL Active Security Monitor, a diagnostic tool which checked the local PC's security status, and recommended additional security software from AOL or Download.com. The script rated the data processor on a variety of different areas of security and general computer health. Two months later, AOL released AOL Active Virus Shield. This software was developed by Kaspersky Lab. Active Virus Shield software was free and did not require an AOL account, only an internet email address. The ISP side of AOL UK was bought by Carphone Warehouse in October 2006 to take advantage of their 100,000 LLU customers, making Carphone Warehouse the biggest LLU provider in the UK.
In August 2006, AOL announced they would render away email accounts and software previously available only to its paying customers provided the guest accessed AOL or AOL.com through a non-AOL-owned access method otherwise known as "third party transit", "bring your own access", or "BYOA". The extend was designed to reduce costs associated with the "Walled Garden" business framework by reducing ownership of AOL-owned access points and shifting members with high-speed internet access from client-based ownership to the more lucrative advertising provider, AOL.com. The modify from paid to free was also intentional to slow the rate of members canceling their accounts and defecting to Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo!, or other free email providers. The other free services included:
Also that month, AOL informed its US customers it would be increasing the price of its dial-up access to US$25.90. The put was factor of an attempt to migrate the service's remaining dial-up users to broadband, as the increased price was the same price they had been charging for monthly DSL access. However, AOL subsequently began offering unlimited dial-up access for $9.95 a month.
On November 16, 2006, Randy Falco succeeded Jonathan Miller as CEO. In December 2006, AOL closed their last remaining call center in the United States, "taking the America out of America Online" according to industry pundits. Service centers based in India and the Philippines continue to this day to provide customer support and technical assistance to subscribers.
On September 17, 2007, AOL announced it was moving one of its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia, to New York City and combining its various advertising units into a new subsidiary called Platform A. This action followed several advertising acquisitions, most notably Advertising.com, and highlighted the company's new focus on advertising-driven business models. AOL management stressed "significant operations" will remain in Dulles, which included the company's access services and modem banks.
In October 2007, AOL announced it would move one of its other headquarters from Loudoun County, Virginia, to New York City, while continuing to operate its Virginia offices. As element of the impending move to New York and the restructuring of responsibilities at the Dulles headquarters complex after the Reston move, AOL CEO Randy Falco announced on October 15, 2007, plans to lay off 2,000 employees worldwide by the end of 2007, beginning "immediately". The end result was a near 40% layoff across the board at AOL. Most compensation packages associated with the October 2007 layoffs included a minimum of 120 days of severance pay, 60 of which were assumption in lieu of the 60-day advance notice prerequisite by provisions of the 1988 Federal WARN Act.
By November 2007, AOL's customer base had been reduced to 10.1 million subscribers, just narrowly ahead of Comcast and AT&T Yahoo!. According to Falco, as of December 2007, the conversion rate of accounts from paid access to free access was over 80%.
On January 3, 2008, AOL announced the closing of one of its three Northern Virginia data centers, Reston Technology Center, and sold it to CRG West. On February 6, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced Time Warner would split AOL's internet access and advertising businesses in two, with the opportunity of later selling the internet access division.
On March 13, 2008, AOL purchased the social networking site Bebo for $850m £417m. On July 25, AOL announced it was shedding Xdrive, AOL Pictures, and BlueString to save on costs and focus on its core advertising business. AOL Pictures was terminated on December 31. On October 31, AOL Hometown a web hosting service for the websites of AOL customers and the AOL Journal blog hosting service were eliminated.
On March 12, 2009, Tim Armstrong, formerly with Google, was named chairman and CEO of AOL. Shortly thereafter, on May 28, Time Warner announced it would spin off AOL as an self-employed person company once Google's shares ceased at the end of the fiscal year. On November 23, AOL unveiled a sneak preview of a new brand identity which has the wordmark "Aol." superimposed onto canvases created by commissioned artists. The new identity, designed by Wolff Olins, was enacted onto all of AOL's services on December 10, the date AOL traded independently for the first time since the Time Warner merger on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AOL.
On April 6, 2010, AOL announced plans todown or sell Bebo; on June 16, the property was sold to Criterion Capital Partners for an undisclosed amount, believed to be around $10 million. In December, intention eliminated access to AOL chat rooms noting a marked decline of patronage in recent months.
Under Armstrong's leadership, AOL began taking steps in a new business direction, marked by a series of acquisitions. On June 11, 2009, AOL had already announced the acquisition of Patch Media, a network of community-specific news and information sites which focuses on individual towns and communities. On September 28, 2010, at the San Francisco TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, AOL signed an agreement to acquire TechCrunch to further its overall strategy of providing premier online content. On December 12, 2010, AOL acquired about.me, a personal array and identity platform, four days after that latter's public launch.
On January 31, 2011, AOL announced the acquisition of European video distribution network, goviral. In March 2011, AOL acquired Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington replaced AOL content chief David Eun, assuming the role of president and editor-in-chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group. On March 10, AOL announced it would profile around 900 workers due to the HuffPost acquisition.
On September 14, 2011, AOL formed a strategic ad selling partnership with two of its largest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft. According to the new partnership, the three companies would begin selling inventory on regarded and identified separately. other's sites. The strategy was designed to help them compete with Google and ad networks.
On February 28, 2012, AOL partnered with PBS to launch MAKERS, a digital documentary series focusing on high-achieving women in male-dominated industries such(a) as war, comedy, space, business, Hollywood and politics. Subjects for MAKERS episodes have included Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, Martha Stewart, Indra Nooyi, Lena Dunham, and Ellen DeGeneres.
On March 15, 2012, AOL announced the acquisition of Hipster, a mobile photo-sharing app for an undisclosed amount. On April 9, 2012, AOL announced a deal to sell 800 patents to Microsoft for $1.056 billion. The deal includes a "perpetual" license for AOL to use these patents.
In April, AOL took several steps to expand its ability to generate revenue through Digital Content NewFront DCNF a two-week event held by AOL, Digital Content NewFront were conducted in advance of the traditional television upfronts in hopes of diverting more advertising money into the digital space. On April 24, the company launched the AOL On network, a single website for its video output.
In February 2013, AOL reported its fourth quarter revenue of $599.5 million, its first growth in quarterly revenue in eight years.
In August 2013, Armstrong announced Patch Media would scale back or sell hundreds of its local news sites. not long afterwards, layoffs began, with up to 500 out of 1,100 positions initially impacted. On January 15, 2014, Patch Media was spun off, with majority ownership being held by Hale Global. By the end of 2014, AOL controlled 0.74% of the global advertising market, well behind industry leader Google's 31.4%.
On January 23, 2014, AOL acquired Gravity, a software startup that tracked users' online behavior and tailored ads and content based on their interests, for $83 million. The deal, which includedroughly 40 Gravity employees and their personalization technology, was CEO Tim Armstrong's fourth largest deal since taking over the company in 2009. Later that year, AOL also acquired Vidible, which developed technology to help websites run video content from other publishers, and help video publishers sell their content to these websites. The deal, which was announced December 1, 2014, was reportedly worth roughly $50 million.