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AOL Held Talks To Buy YouTube, Facebook in 2006, Ex-CEO Reveals (cnbc.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the alternative-universe dept.
Add another chapter to your internet revisionist history books: AOL held talks to buy both Facebook and YouTube in 2006 and considered taking a large minority stake in Tencent in 2004. From a report: Obviously none of this happened -- and the board of Time Warner is to blame, said ex-AOL CEO Jon Miller in an exclusive CNBC interview. Miller has never discussed the failed talks publicly before. Miller said he discussed buying YouTube from the founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, in January and July 2006. He spoke with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the spring of that year, he said. The Tencent talks were held in 2004, Miller said. "We wanted to take some shots," Miller said. "We had a line on buying YouTube before anybody else. We had an opportunity to step in with Facebook when Yahoo stumbled. We had a chance to maybe to step in to Tencent."
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AOL Held Talks To Buy YouTube, Facebook in 2006, Ex-CEO Reveals More

AOL Held Talks To Buy YouTube, Facebook in 2006, Ex-CEO Reveals

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      It's like Sears. In the early 20th Century Sears dominated the then-new technology of mail order. By the mid-20th century it had leveraged its massive distribution infrastructure to create a vast network of retail stores. Yet from the 1950s it began to die from the head down, unwilling to respond to changes in retailing because it's aging customer base continued spending money in its dingy, old-fashioned stores out of habit.

      As late as 1973 the company had cash to burn on a ridiculously lavish headquarters

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        At the time of the AOL Time Warner acquisition (it wasn't a merger), AOL was the world's most valued corporation of all time.

        *sigh*

    • Wow!

      Imagine if they had bought Facebook... AOL might still exist, and Facebook would be incompetently ran instead of evilly ran. Facebook would be like Twitter is today.

  • I had talks earlier today too... (Score:5, Funny)

    by denzacar ( 181829 ) on Friday August 16, 2019 @09:07AM (#59093748) Journal

    ...whether to make myself a sandwich.

    But then the cat started making noises, demanding to be petted...
    So nothing came out of that deal at the time. I am reconsidering that sandwich project though...

    There. About as relevant a story as the one above. Plus there's pussy in it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      ...whether to make myself a sandwich.

      But then the cat started making noises, demanding to be petted...
      So nothing came out of that deal at the time. I am reconsidering that sandwich project though...

      There. About as relevant a story as the one above. Plus there's pussy in it.

      Are you still taking investors for your sandwich project? I'm looking to get into some projects that have a good chance at an IPO.

    • You don't understant
      I coulda been somebody
      I could have had class
      I coulda been a contender
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Well I dunno, it's not totally uninteresting to think about alternate histories. For example, I think Atari almost bought/licensed/partnered with Nintendo's USA expansion, but as I recall there was some really dumb minor kerfuffle that the caused the Atari C-levels to take offense and call the whole thing off.

    • You obviously needed to use sudo to make yourself a sandwich [xkcd.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      Former beer magnate Miller eviscerated AOL. He's trying to redeem himself for destroying the formerly most valued company of all time AFTER it recovered from the failed Time Warner acquisition.

      Most of their former buildings in Sterling, VA are now occupied by Raytheon.

  • Now we know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by XxtraLarGe ( 551297 ) on Friday August 16, 2019 @09:13AM (#59093772) Journal
    how YouTube & Facebook could possibly have been worse.
  • making: Drones, VR headsets, vape devices, but I was too busy at the time. Big whoop! AOL? I think there are some of those silly CD's still floating around too.

    • I know right? I send a bill to the producers of jeopardy! for my winnings when I watch it at home.

    • I got in at the ground floor when AOL was giving out floppy diskettes. They could be formatted and reused if you put tape over the write protect tab. I remember grabbing the whole box at least once.

  • Man admits on national TV... (Score:3)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Friday August 16, 2019 @09:17AM (#59093792) Journal

    So basically he fucked up like 4 times then?

    Sure, blame your board. Except it's kind of your job to convince them it's a good idea to do these things. You failed, and your company is a shriveled, emaciated husk of what was once the biggest name on the Internet.

    Oh, but it was the board's fault that you couldn't execute...

    • "Sure, blame your board. Except it's kind of your job to convince them it's a good idea to do these things."

      That's not how it works. Oh, that's how we treat people, but the fact is that ultimate responsibility lies with the same party that has ultimate authority.

      It's the board's job to appoint a CEO that can and will do the job, and their job to listen to him. If they couldn't manage either of those things, then the board is at fault.

      I understand that in modern society it is the standard operating procedure

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        My experience with working with upper-levels of company management... You're likely never going to get what you want the first time you ask. If this dude truly believed that pursuing an acquisition was a worthwhile move for the company he would have pecked at the board until they acquiesced or replaced him.

        At my last place, the CIO wanted to do a top-to-bottom replacement of our network infrastructure to get every office (we had hundreds) on to a common platform. It was a foundation for other things he w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      This former beer boss destroyed AOL. He's just trying to revise history so his kids and grandkids won't be ashamed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      You failed, and your company is a shrivelled, emaciated husk of what was once the biggest name on the Internet.

      AOL was a shrivelled, emaciated husk of a viable entity while it was still one of the biggest names on the Internet.

      YouTube as owned by AOL would not be the YouTube we recognize today. YouTube as owned by AOL might well have become yet another MySpace meme.

      AOL only ever wanted to make a non-Internet.

      Dementer DNA is the Ebola of mergers and acquisitions. Facebook as owned by AOL might have survived

  • Perspective (Score:3)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Friday August 16, 2019 @09:23AM (#59093826)

    This is interesting, but understand that it doesn't mean that AOL could have potentially still have been around and relevant. It's more likely that given how AOL was managed, if they had actually bought them Facebook and Youtube would be footnotes in internet history and wouldn't be nearly the players they are today.

  • Although people think YT is a great property, it loses tons of money according to some people (like $700+ million). It only "sort of" works for Google because they use it for data collection. But knowing some of the AOL guys on the business side: they just got lucky in general. The business guys are idiots who found a gold mine.

    • YT does seem like the sort of thing that bleeds money but you hang onto because it makes other business sense, like webmail.
  • "I coulda been a contender..."
  • Sounds like a major blunder given the success of these companies today, but you aren't considering how bad AOL could have just screwed them up. Seems google was in a better position to expand YouTube with all of the video streaming infrastructure vs AOL

  • Imagine AOL buying FB in 2006. Today, FB would be as relevant as AOL. Just think of the privacy implications!

  • Apply Aol's Kiss of Death (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Friday August 16, 2019 @10:19AM (#59094024) Homepage
    Whatever they bought, they would apply so much advertising to it, that it would be crushed to death like ICQ.
  • Before it's too late (it is)

  • Nothing lost. The idea that AOL "had discussions" pretty much sums up the life of AOL. I can't remember - did AOL own Netscape back in 2006? I remember passing on an opportunity to work at NS back in 1996 (NS bought a company I worked for) - I took the money and ran. But my friends went to CA and were laid off by the next year. Then the internet bubble popped.

    so I'm thinking -- was AOL a concern by 2006? I owned NS stock -> AOL -> Time-Warner and pretty sure I didn't break even until 2008.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      I was reviewing my taxes recently and I am still getting reductions for stock losses from dumping AOL stock in the early 2000s. Heh.

  • if i think the same i would be a bitcoin multi millionare when i was going to buy 500â worth of bitcoins when they cost a few cents amd i was exited about it, but thought why to put money on such when i can buy beer and pizza.
  • He talks about the companies that became huge today and would have been, in principle, a great decision at the time, but what about the dozens or maybe hundreds of other companies that they could have bought a stake in that Time Warner also said no got nowhere and would have become a huge money sink?

    Hindsight is 20/20.

  • Only bringing up the successful ones now is mildly interesting, as I am sure several other companies considered it.

    I am really curious, what other companies had they talked about buying? I think that would round out the picture quite a bit.

    Everyone talks about the one good idea they had, nobody talks about the 500 stupid ideas they had.

  • Yeah, and we thought we were to be bought by Disney.

    Don't believe these dumb rumors. Nobody at AOL was thinking buying YouTube.

  • Yes Yes you had a chance to date a hot girl back in high school too, but were too busy being a nerd. It happens.

  • Imagine how Facebook and YouTube would have fared under AOL's amazing leadership! You think they're big NOW, just imagine how much EVEN HUGER they would have been with a giant dumb company like AOL setting their direction!

    Hint: it would probably involve videos and friend requests arriving in your snail mail on floppy discs.

    I'm sure Zuck lies awake at night thinking about what could have been...

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Would have made 100x my original investment by now. Boo hoo.
  • And just like with AOL back in the 1990s, Facebook "is the Internet", and it is filled with the Lowest of the Lowest Common Denominator. And just like AOL in it's late years, Facebook really does not want to leave. The only thing missing are the endless Facebook CDs in the mail.
  • Youtube and Facebook were about leadership, if AOL bought them up, the same leadership that ran AOL into the ground would have run Facebook and Youtube into the ground, or best sold them off for a fraction of what they paid for them.

  • “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”

      John Greenleaf Whittier

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