AOL At 25 Focuses On Local ContentAOL At 25 Focuses On Local Content

For AOL what comes around goes around. The commodity AOL promised 25 years ago -- compelling content -- is what AOL is promising now as the online company celebrates its 25th anniversary.

In its early days AOL was known less for its content than for its diskettes, as the company put millions of Americans online for the first time, albeit usually on slow dialup connections. The ubiquitous diskettes holding AOL software flooded the country for years. At its high point in 2002, some 35 million Americans received their primary Web connections from AOL. Today the number is about five million, still a respectable number and many connections are high speed broadband.

Along the way, AOL wounded some major corporations including Time Warner before reinventing itself last December. In 2000, AOL merged with Time Warner in a $162 billion deal, said to have been the largest merger in history. It may also have been the most disastrous in history. Time Warner stock plunged from $184 to below $45 a share.

Last year, a decade and many billions of dollars later, AOL became a standalone company again as it spun off from Time Warner. The new AOL is staking out a different kind of content -- local content.

It kicked off a rebranding effort and has been launching a series of Web sites focusing on local community news through its Seed.com and Patch.com sites.

In January, AOL acquired StudioNow, a company that provides an online platform for creating, storing, and distributing video. AOL said it would fold StudioNow technology into Seed.com, expanding the Web site's current offerings of professionally created writing and pictures.

“AOL ...became a household name by helping people get online and connect with communities,” said AOL’s current chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong in a statement. “Today, helping people is the center point of our brand and we believe that investing in our local communities with our time, energy and resources is important.”

The key figures in AOL’s history are long gone from the company. Its co-founder Steve Case walked away with billions from the deal with Time Warner. A few years later, Case said it would be best to “undo” the merger and allow AOL to go off on its own. Time Warner’s CEO at the time of the merger, Gerald Levin, left the merged company in December of 2001.

AOL began in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services Inc., which offered online services on the Commodore 64.