Google Sells AOL Stake Back To Time Warner For $283 Million

Everyone is claiming that Google lost $700 million in this deal, which is true, but I think it's more important to notice that by selling now they are avoiding future losses. It always sucks to sell a stock after you've lost money on it, but it sucks even more to ride it down further if there's very little hope of it recovering.

Google already had written this off as a defensive cost to be sure. There's never been a surprise about this deal not being, prima facie, a good equity investment. However since it's been publicly traded, losing three points of market share would have had a much more material effect on the market cap, such that this made perfect sense to do.

As for how much it generated, I'll bet it was breakeven. Assume Google had a 90/10 or 85/15 revshare with AOL, so Google made maybe $100M-$150M off this deal if the prior three years' numbers are correct above.

Any ideas how much Google made from the deal? If they did the same that AOL did, they made out okay on their investment despite the lower sell price:

> The Google relationship generated $678 million in revenue for AOL in 2008, $642 million in 2007, and $573 million in 2006