Hi Lee, welcome to the thread. IMO, MSPG and AOL are fundamentally different businesses. Per their recent Q1 CC (see my notes at siliconinvestor.com, MSPG makes .8% of their revenue from advertising. I don't have a comparable number for AOL, but consider these quotes from their recent 10Q (http://sec.yahoo.com/e/l/a/aol.html):
"For the three months ended March 31, 1999, subscription services revenues increased from $580 million to $869 million, or
50%..."
"Advertising and commerce fees increased by 119%, from $96 million in the three months ended March 31, 1998 to $210 million in the three months ended March 31, 1999...At March 31, 1999, the Company's advertising and commerce backlog...was approximately $1.3 billion, up from approximately $450 million at March 31, 1998."
To summarize that, AOL made almost 25% as much $ from advertising as it did from dialup and their advertising revenue is growing at 119%! In addition to that it has revenue streams that MSPG can only dream about, like the fact that many content providers pay AOL to set up shop on AOL's turf. AOL charges them to set up shop, charges its subs to shop there, and takes a cut of the transactions. Now *that* is a business model!
I could go on, but it is enough to say that AOL is not a simple ISP like MSPG. Don't take my word for it, do some reading. MSPG's most similar competitor is ELNK.
Peace,
Mr Bones
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