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We all knew it would come sooner or later.  AOL has been lagging behind for years, ever since broadband started popping up everywhere and AOL had to find other means of making money.  Time Warner tried to find a potential suitor for the ailing division, but nobody seemed to care.  Now it’s come to this.

After 9 years of the merger which originally saw AOL as essentially buying out Time Warner to form AOL Time Warner, Time Warner has decided to distance itself from AOL.  By the end of the year AOL will be its own company once again.  This time it will have former Google executive Tim Armstrong at the helm.  AOL is currently trying to rely on advertising on its services as well as other limited spaces across the web.  There might be room to grow under Armstrong’s direction, however unlikely it may seem.

AOL used to be the biggest name in ISPs, it seemed almost everyone was using it back in the days of dial-up.  Who can forget the countless ads for companies that rather than giving their URL, gave the AOl keyword you needed to find it?  Now it’s the company that not even Yahoo or Microsoft wanted to take of the hand of Time Warner. 

Part of this is sad in a nostalgic way, until the realization that AOL never really was all that amazing in the first place.  It created a walled garden in the Internet that almost made the whole idea of the Internet almost nonexistent.  After only 2 years of the merger then AOL Time Warner reported a $99 billion loss, which was right around the time Google started in its advertising business.  It’s hard to believe that any company could bounce back from being top of the industry, and then falling to an almost laughable state.

Read [Wired]