AOL somehow still has 1.5 million paying subscribers

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Verizon has decided to get out of the media business and has agreed to sell its Verizon Media unit to Apollo Global Management for a staggering $5 billion. Verizon Media is made up of several media companies, including a relic of the early days of the internet, AOL.

AOL has been around since the 1980s and became a leading internet provider throughout the 1990s. It became so large that it purchased Time Warner Cable for $182 billion in 2000. AOL is no longer making it by selling dial-up internet, but the company has evolved to remain relevant years after its peak.

According to CNBC, AOL internet subscribers are now in the “low thousands,” down from around 2 million just five years ago. But it looks like the company saw this coming, and now there are approximately 1.5 million subscribers to a service called AOL Advantage.

AOL Advantage is a subscription service that offers technical assistance, as well as online identity theft protection. The service costs either $9.99 or $14.99 per month, so the company is making around $180 million in revenue per year from this service. That’s pretty impressive for a dial-up internet company in 2021.

These are some pretty surprising numbers coming from a company that many of us haven’t heard from in years. AOL is definitely not the internet giant that it used to be, but it has done well to maintain some relevance in that space. It will be interesting to see if and how this new acquisition will affect the company going forward.

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Editors’ Recommendations:

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Alex Gatewood

Staff writer at KnowTechie. Alex has two years of experience covering all things technology, from video games to electric cars. He's a gamer at heart, with a passion for first-person shooters and expansive RPGs. Shoot him an email at alex@knowtechie.com