Is this the end of AOL as we know it? If so, it feels fine

The AOL name brings up images of dial-up Internet, so the company might ditch it completely

If you're of my vintage, AOL conjures up certain images, and most of them aren't good. Sure, it makes you think of only the earliest days of the Internet, but also screen names and chat rooms, and of the endless number of disks promising you hours of free service. It also makes us think of a company that none of us have thought about, or used, in a very long time. Frankly, the image many of us now have of AOL is not exactly flattering.

It's also an outdated image, and the company knows it. So it might go as far as ditching the AOL name altogether, Allie Kline, AOL's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider on Sunday.

"I actually don't think there's a bad choice, but we have to make the choice," she said. "Are we going to keep the AOL brand or are we going to bring a new brand to market?"

While ditching the AOL brand entirely sounds like a drastic measure, it really might be the best thing for the company going forward. 

As I said earlier, the image most people have of AOL is probably dial-up Internet. While the company still had 2.1 million people paying for its dial-up Internet service as of the first quarter of 2015, it now makes the vast majority of its money off as an advertising platform. 

In the wake of its disastrous, and ill-fated, merger with Time Warner, AOL shifted its focus, turning itself into a major player as a video and advertising platform. The company purchased video advertising platform Adap.tv for $405 million in 2013, which was one of AOL's largest acquisitions ever, even more than the $315 million it paid for the Huffington Post in 2011, but it paid off, leading the company to see double digit ad growth in 2014, the first time that happened since 2008.

As of Q1 2015, the last quarter AOL reported it earnings before it was bought by Verizon for $44 billion, the company made $625.1 million in revenue, of which $483.5 of that came from global advertising.

The largest percent of ad revenue came from third party properties, or sites that AOL helps sell advertising on, as opposed to display and search ads, which it runs on its own properties.

The company made $231.6 million from third party ads, which nearly made more money than from display and search ads combined, and it explains why Verizon wanted to get its hands on the company's video and advertising services.

The big question for the future of AOL after the Verizon acquistion was what would happen to the company's various content sites, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget. It didn't seem as though Verizon would have much interest in running AOL as a media company.

Already one of those other companies, Crunchbase, has been spun off, but, other than that, there has not been much movement. Perhaps the AOL brand could be kept to encompass those media companies, which its video and advertising services could be rebranded.

Or perhaps this won't happen at all, and the AOL name will be kept. The company has done internal branding research on the proposed rebranding, which has been split on the issue. Even Kline herself doesn't seem to know which way she wants it to go quite yet. 

"If you ask me today, I could say, 'I feel very strongly about the AOL brand. It has a lot of legacy and meaning, and we shouldn’t move away from it!'" Kline told Business Insider. "But if we met tomorrow, I could be like, ‘Yes! We need a new name!’ It’s a very hard needle to thread for us."

VatorNews reached out to AOL, but the company declined to comment any further. 

(Image source: vice.com)