AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
112 comments
·October 29, 2025jacobgkau
People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).
AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.
(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)
jrochkind1
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
zaptheimpaler
Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.
timmg
Wow, that's interesting.
I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.
I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.
echelon
Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.
Invictus0
The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right
sauercrowd
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
cestith
I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
dangus
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
zipy124
seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).
RobotToaster
Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.
Shared404
> Apollo Global Management
Oh hey, the company that orchestrated my first layoff!
Highly recommend Plunder (ISBN: 978-1541702103) for those who want to learn more about the enshittification these companies bring.
null
vjvjvjvjghv
Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy
bluedino
I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
logifail
> I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains
ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...
mlyle
> > mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
einsteinx2
So change the email address on those accounts?
skrebbel
Wow way to miss the point
logifail
My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess I'm also "legacy"?
I don't think I'm missing any point, thanks.
IT4MD
[dead]
nostrademons
Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
neom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
pavel_lishin
> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21]
Damn.
xp84
This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe.
A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.
philipallstar
Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.
marstall
How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?
everfrustrated
They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an Italian (Milan) company.
They wanted the product not the developers.
amiga386
Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product.
The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone.
Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony, because they don't want to be next.
dangus
Transitional severance agreements to have the current staff transfer operations to new staff.
A_Duck
And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons
internetter
Bending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do.
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
kbar13
holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PE
dancc
Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
I enjoyed this part:
No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
everfrustrated
I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
veidr
I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:
If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)
Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
Barrin92
>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.
Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.
qingcharles
I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.
croisillon
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
dotcoma
And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
JohnClark1337
So companies go there to die
alberth
At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
bdcravens
When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of their peak market cap
https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
ec109685
That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
everfrustrated
We'll probably be saying the same about a lot of AI companies as well....
dylan604
at the end of the last tech bubble, Herman Miller chairs were available for cheap. wonder what the score from the ashes will come this round?
mschild
Hopefully some more chairs. Mine's running on 25 years now and it has at least 1 broken part which is expensive to fix.
einsteinx2
Lots and lots of powerful GPUs I would imagine.
Anarch157a
dirt cheap Nvidia GPUs, perhaps ?
deepserket
rack space i guess
ascagnel_
I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".
JustExAWS
AOL did exactly the right thing. They knew their stock was overvalued and did some shady accounting to prop their stock up until the acquisition and it immediately crashed.
How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
bsimpson
At the turn of the millennium, they were valuable enough to buy Warner Bros.
jjice
I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them.
I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
avrionov
Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.
4ndrewl
Someone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying users.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
ekjhgkejhgk
For all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5 years and you have no levers to effect change as a small shareholder.
This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
DHPersonal
Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve used and stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app becomes obsolete.
null
stabbles
They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
IncreasePosts
This might just be an accounting trick.
A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing machine for the rest of the company - spend the cash on some other concept and hope that new thing becomes a stand alone product on its own.
Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of printing lottery tickets that other employees are scratching off, the cash is being sent up to the parent company, who may just have employees in another entity being funded by the money from komoot.
BozeWolf
Except that it now has ten times the number of reminders popping up to please subscribe for premium, even though I already have the world maps package, so they got some of my money already.
dep_b
If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They usually fire 80% after acquisition.
everfrustrated
AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left to cut.
flakiness
This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company. Recommend to whoever interested in this company: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
sharkjacobs
> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted.
I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization
rootbear
Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.
Macha
AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users
WarOnPrivacy
> Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.
Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep upending themselves for funsies.
In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't exciting enough.
So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.
mattmaroon
Somehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that is still kicking.
dotcoma
Yahoo! Mail is still working
https://archive.is/Ouc0B