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An unclear update for AOL should soon start downloading now that Bending Spoons has inked a deal to buy the online portal from Apollo Global Management.
The deal is the latest in a series of transactions that have seen the Milan-based firm roll up a roster of sites and services that once led their fields and have since faded.
“AOL is an iconic, beloved business that’s in good health, has stood the test of time, and we believe has unexpressed potential,” says Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari. “By our estimation, AOL is one of the top 10 most-used email providers in the world, with a highly retained customer base counting around 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users.”
Ferrari pledges “to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish” after the deal closes, which Bending Spoons expects to see happen by the end of this year.
That announcement has the CEO emphasizing that his company has a long-term interest in AOL: “Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business—we’re confident we’re the right long-term steward for AOL, and look forward to serving its large, loyal customer base for many years to come.”
Bending Spoons didn’t provide financial details beyond saying it’s financing this acquisition with a $2.8 billion funding package from a long list of banks, but Axios media reporter Sara Fischer reports that the company will pay $1.5 billion.
That would be an immense discount from the $4.4 billion that Verizon paid for AOL in 2015, which itself represented a plunge from AOL’s dubious apex in 2000: its doomed, $183 billion acquisition of Time Warner that valued the combined firm at $350 billion.
Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo (which it had purchased in 2016 for $4.8 billion) to Apollo, a private-equity firm, for $5 billion in 2021. AOL has become an afterthought since, although its ending its dial-up service in September earned it a fresh round of headlines.
AOL will be the latest in a growing line of tech properties that Bending Spoons has picked up over the last few years: the note-taking app Evernote, the file-sending tool WeTransfer, the former WeWork subsidiary Meetup, and the video-recording and streaming service Streamyard. The Italian company has another major acquisition pending, a $1.38 billion purchase of the streaming-video platform Vimeo announced in September.
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The news of AOL’s next corporate overload got a skeptical reception in some quarters. Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer tech newsletter, griped on Bluesky that “Bending Spoons buys dying tech brands and jacks up their prices to maximize pain for their remaining customers,” calling that “the final stage of enshittification before death.”
Asked to comment, Bending Spoons spokesman Christopher Keenan rejected Newton’s notion. “The facts don’t bear out a cynical take like the one you linked,” he wrote in an email.
“First, all of our businesses are now healthy and profitable,” he said. “And second, we make significant investments in the products for improved long-term performance.”
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Keenan provided a list of upgrades at such Bending Spoons subsidiaries as Meetup, Brightcove, and Evernote as well as subsequent growth metrics, such as a 20% increase in new registrations at Meetup and an “all-time high” in Evernote customer retention.
(As a paying Evernote user, I can attest that I’ve seen substantial improvements in that app since Bending Spoons took it over in 2023.)
Many of Bending Spoons’ purchases, however, have also been followed by large layoffs and, in some cases, the movement of development teams from the US to Europe.
In an October 2024 interview with Gergely Orosz, publisher of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, Ferrari defended his firm’s playbook for newly acquired companies. The CEO said Bending Spoons takes a deep look at a property’s potential and then makes staff cuts if it sees them necessary to implement the company’s long-term vision for that subsidiary–a process that he allowed “sucks” for everyone involved.
“We try to close that gap between the status quo and that vision as quickly as we can,” Ferrari told Orosz. “We believe that on the other side of that painful transition, the company is much better positioned to kick ass for five or 10 years down the line.”
So while AOL’s future remains fuzzy, this much seems certain: If you work for AOL, it wouldn’t hurt to update your profile on LinkedIn.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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