Bubble deals are delightful. Time Warner and AOL merging marked the height of bad mergers in the last tech bubble. Since every trading company is now basically a tech company in disguise I wonder if this time around these mega deals will be seen as disastrous in the eyes of history.
Click through the interstitial and you can watch the whole thing, which goes into mergers [relevant!] as well as AOL/TW particularly.
Needless to say, it was difficult to predict. In terms of the top websites by traffic cited in the lecture (and looked at by the FTC for monopoly review) you had (in decreasing order w/ unique visits per 1 month, units not mentioned):
AOL 61, Y! 52.7, MS 51.4, Lycos 30.8, Excite Network 27, Go Network 23, About 20.6, AltaVista 19.2, TimeWarner 15.9, Amazon 15.3
You've got a crystal ball if you could have looked at that, predicted the future, and said "Gee, joining up AOL with a media company is a really bad idea."
