AOL For Free (and not just 1,000 hours)?

Saw this item today on music industry site www.HitsDailyDouble.com:

AOL chief Jonathan Miller is about to unveil a new business strategy to Wall Street that turns its back on selling and marketing the company’s 17-year-old dial-up (and high speed) access service in favor of bolstering its free, web-based content, which would result in price cuts for existing subscribers and thousands of layoffs. The plan would target such competitors as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen estimates that this plan could well cut AOL’s revenue from domestic subscriptions by 52%, or $2.1 billion at an annual rate. And operating profit could fall by $251 million, 14% of her estimate for this year. Time Warner's shares closed at $16.84 a share on Friday, down more than 11% from its 52-week high.

It's going to be interesting to see how AOL re-engineers itself. Talk about a bold move - intentionally cutting $2.1 bilion to re-focus and re-brand a service. AOL is also working on transforming Instant Messenger into a social networking application to compete w/ MySpace, Xanga, etc. Content is no longer king: content that allows for data collection to pitch to advertisers is the new model.

Some acquaintences of mine have a merchandiising company that handles a lot of bands, mostly punk, emo, metal and hardcore. They grossed about $1.6 million last year and project about $3M this year. The real value: the 800k customer names they have that have been roughly estimated to be worth $20+ million. T-shirts, beanies and wristbands are nice, but gimme info and watch the value soar. Come to think of it, what's the market value of blogger.com?