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Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief executive of AOL’s parent company Time Warner, said Time Warner was open for a deal on AOL. He also acknowledged weakness in the Internet company’s business. AOL has indeed lost much of its sex appeal of glorier days, but it is still a powerful web company. First, it has a well-established brand name. Second, AOL made $5.2 billion in 2007 (down 33% from 2006). It also has more than 9 million paying US clients and AOL’s website receives more than 100 million visitors a month.

A major problem of AOL might be the change in the way people browse the web. In the past, people used to go to portals such as Yahoo! or AOL, but today they just go to a search engine to quickly find what they’re looking for. AOL has not yet been able to establish itself as a search engine, so it is understandable that the company finds it extremely difficult to compete with Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft. It hasn’t even got a chance to compete in the online advertising market.

Via the NY Times:

AOL will not meet its revenue goal for the first quarter this year, according to several of its senior executives, who also say it is unlikely to achieve full-year objectives. Advertisers say the company has fallen into a pattern of calling clients at the end of each quarter to offer last-minute price cuts on additional ads.

This being said, AOL has to go through a lot of changes. It does have advantages though and a new partner company might find a solution to get AOL back on track. But who will be it and for how much?