AOL and DMOZ

Why does wall street think of this?

[tictoc]

I could not post in the previous forum because it was outdated but I am surprised wall street is not giving AOL/Time Warner a hard time for funding Dmoz. Is it considered a charity from AOL for the hosting/servers? or do they pay all these expenses?

What does AOL really get out of this relationship? I see their logo but not even a link to AOL from the main page or a search box from the main page.

Hutcheson had some good answers to this in a previous post about AOL/Dmoz but I really do not think this has been brought up in the spotlight to shareholders.

[flicker]

Why would they? It must cost peanuts to run. The editors work for free. The price of a couple computers and one or two techs is so far beneath Wall Street's notice they'd probably look at you like you just landed from Mars if you brought it up to them. AOL's net worth is like 50 billion or something like that. If shareholders spent their time worrying about the cost-benefit analysis of every $75,000 AOL spends, they'd have no time left to play the stock market. ;-)

[zCat]

AOL inherited DMOZ when they acquired Netscape. Even though AOL is not directly monetizing it, I'd guess there's a certain "goodwill value" which will have some marketing worth ("hey, AOL are not all bad, they host DMOZ"), and certainly the minimal costs entailed are many magnitudes smaller than the PR costs which would arise should AOL attempt to divest themselves of the service without providing a good home for it.