“You’ve got mail!”
While America Online, better known as AOL, is nowhere near its heights during the late 90s and early Aughts, when the dial-up service had more than 20 million paying subscribers, millions of people still hear that infamous catchphrase to this day when logging into their email account on America Online, better known as AOL.
And those millions of users are worth a significant chunk of change to the Italian app maker Bending Spoons, which just announced it was acquiring AOL from Yahoo for a whopping $1.5 billion.
“AOL is an iconic, beloved business that’s in good health, has stood the test of time, and we believe has unexpressed potential,” said Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder, Luca Ferrari, in a statement along with the company’s acquisition announcement. “By our estimation, AOL is one of the top ten most-used email providers in the world, with a highly retained customer base counting around 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users. We intend to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish.”
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Bending Spoons also announced it took on $2.8 billion in debt financing in order to fund the AOL acquisition, among other investments.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, AOL still pulls in more than $500 million annually in revenue, resulting in roughly $400 million in earnings each year.
Last month, AOL officially sunsetted the company’s dial-up service offerings after 30 years. However, while only hundreds of thousands of users in the U.S. still utilized dial-up, more than one million customers still pay AOL for other services, such as cybersecurity and technical support.
Bending Spoons has been on an acquisition spree in recent years, buying up well-established online brands that seem to have grown stagnant among newer competition.
In 2022, Bending Spoons acquired the note-taking platform Evernote and pro video mobile app company FiLMiC. In 2024, the company bought the real-life community platform MeetUp, streaming service StreamYard, and the file-sharing platform WeTransfer. Earlier this year, Bending Spoons acquired streaming platform Brightcove. Just last month, the Italian app maker announced it was acquiring the online video platform Vimeo.
As Mashable’s Chris Taylor wrote over the summer, AOL was once a pioneer in the online space. From Instant Messenger to AOL Chat, the company transformed what the web would be and laid the foundational ground for today’s big tech companies.
