AOL may have to return to its profitable core business - dial-up. Yes, AOL still has millions of dial-up accounts, and those bring in more revenue than the content farms.<p>Somebody has to serve middle America.
Of note from the article is that Huffington Post is not the money-maker it used to be.<p>I have noticed this from my own browsing habits. I actively avoid Huffington Post if I want anything resembling unbiased or accurate news. More often these days, it seems like they are willing to regurgitate any old blog post or celebrity tweet as a news item. That type of content is a lot less valuable to me (and it seems to others as well) than original reporting and journalism - anything other than "what this celebrity posted to instagram".
Interesting that Techcrunch mentions traffic percentage drops of other AOL owned properties like Huffington Post and PawNation, but carefully leaves itself out of that particular paragraph. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a Techcrunch article shared on my LinkedIn or Facebook feed, it feels like TheVerge has done a better job at taking the tech mantle (but that is just my opinion), maybe the people I know just prefer sites like TheVerge instead.<p>I think Techcrunch needs a little bit of a shake-up to be quite honest. The quality of the articles have been very sub-par for a very long time. I am surprised Shingy hasn't had one of his "brain farts", yelled gibberish for 20 minutes like he usually does and save AOL.
I'm wondering if Techcrunch will be affected by this. They didn't really mention anything about that. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to such a site.
While there are some (to me) big sites rumored to be on the chopping block, I'd literally never heard of several candidates before this article. Am I that out of touch with mainstream browsing habits, or had AOL gone crazy with buying content houses whether or not they had audiences?