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    Categories: Weblogs

What’s the Future of AOL?

Who can forget the good old days of America Online, the company of the mid-‘90s that spent a ton of money mailing out CD-ROMs for people to try it. Over the years, it has morphed from a dial-up service to a content company to a mega-merger with Time Warner to a spin-off back into a dial-up service with content. In fact, 43% of the company’s revenues still come from subscriptions, which make up a majority of its profit. But AOL has been aggressive in moving away from the dial-up and ISP model and into content, buying up TechCrunch and more recently Huffington Post for $315 million. But there have been issues along the way, with a Huffington Post blogger strike and the defection of 8 senior staffers from Engadget to SB Nation.

So what will happen to AOL in this latest iteration? Vote in our poll and tell us more in the comments below.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

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