Comment by jahlove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahlove | Hacker News Reader

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Doesn't quite answer your question, but this was AOL's reasoning at the time [0]:

> In a statement, Bob Pittman, president and chief operating officer of America Online, said: "MovieFone will add an exciting new area of local e-commerce to AOL and our other brands. By putting AOL's resources behind MovieFone, we will substantially enhance its already impressive performance and revenue potential," he added. MovieFone, which is expected to be re-branded after the deal as AOL MovieFone, is one of the nation's largest movie-listing and ticketing services with deal with 17,000 screens in 42 cities nationwide. Dulles, Va.-based America Online also nabs the online version MovieFone.com, seen as a complement to Digital City, AOL's local-listing service.

I read that "dotcom days" sentence to be more in reference to dotcom day valuations than anything else.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn....

The reasoning sounds like a very dotcom days reason as well. "We're going to make money on this product because e-commerce and literally any other potential revenue stream possible on the Internet! Do we have a concrete business plan? We don't need one!"

> dotcom day valuations

I still see those bizarre valuations in things like "Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL"

I see all this money thrown around for the chance of profit (but most likely a loss) and I just really wish we had more open source funding. I’d take the job in a heartbeat if I could work full time in open source.

I feel like things like that are a bit of a moonshot.

Interesting, I would like to know how you could turn quoted "17,000" screens into any amount of money that would matter to AOL - by buying MoviePhone.

Most of the money go to studios... theatre operators rely on popcorn and soda sales to survive. So what kind of money can Moviefone make here?

iirc it was advertising aol moviefone in the theaters

That’s giving money to theaters. How does Moviefone make money buying ads?

Sure, but how much money could they make off of it? 17,000 theatres X some # of movie-goers per theatre per month, times 12 months a year, times $money a moviegoer would pay for moviefone ($1?) experience per go... looks like not much money, not for AOL.

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