On May 12, Verizon announced it was buying AOL, that ubiquitous Internet service known for filling mailboxes (snail mail, that is) with CDs and generating the iconic “You’ve Got Mail” indicator when you received mail in your electronic inbox. To give you an idea of AOL’s impact during its heyday, last year a former AOL product manager claimed that when AOL 4.0 was released in 1998, the company used all of the world-wide CD production for several weeks.

According to its 2014 year-end filing, AOL finished the year with 2.2 million dial-up subscribers (those connecting to the Internet through regular phone lines), down around 11% from 2013. AOL’s subscription revenue reached $606.5 million in 2014, or about 24% of the company’s overall sales, according to its filings. AOL’s “membership” group, which includes its dial-up business, generated $562 million in adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) last year. That’s more than eight times as much as the company’s digital media business.

What I find most interesting, though, is that Verizon is paying $4.4 billion for AOL, but apparently for their digital media business and not for the dial-up customers. “Certainly the subscription business and the content businesses are very noteworthy. For us, the principal interest was around the ad tech platform,” said Verizon’s president of operations, John Stratton, at a Jefferies investor conference following the announcement of the deal.

Reading some of the media commentary about the acquisition, I was amazed by the surprise expressed over the fact that a number of people are still using a dial-up connection. For well over a decade, in our annual surveys, over 90% of AAII members have been accessing the Internet via a high-speed connection. A small sliver, though, still have to suffer through the telltale squeaks and squawks of a dial-up connection. According to Pew Research Center data from August 2013, 3% of Americans were still using dial-up at home at the end of December 2012. While the data is a few years old, infrastructure still is a roadblock for those “few” who want to cut the phone line.

I grew up in rural Michigan, and my uncle and cousins who live less than two miles from my childhood home can only access the Internet through dial-up. My sister and her husband, who live a mile away on the same road as my uncle, are at the very end of the DSL line. The phone company, CenturyLink, has no plans at the moment to extend the line because the demand and customer dollars aren’t there to do so. So my cousins are using dial-up on their cutting-edge laptop, or they check email and surf the Web on their iPhones. Sadly, there isn’t a cell tower within miles either, so even that is a struggle.

Whenever I am complaining about my “slow” high-speed connection now that the weather is warm enough to again spend time on my deck, I am reminded of those who are still having to deal with dial-up, and I count my blessings.

In this Issue

This month, Hareesh Jayanthi offers up a review of Quant IX’s Investment Account Manager (IAM) 2.0. These days, most portfolio management and tracking services have moved to the cloud. While they offer ease of access, cloud-based services still have not achieved the level of functionality and flexibility of the top remaining software-based platforms. IAM is one of those programs, and Hareesh walks you through the latest features the software has to offer.

For those interested in dividend-paying stocks, Jaclyn McClellan’s On the Internet installment provides resources for income-seeking investors.

Lastly, I look at two battery cases for the iPhone 6 in this issue’s Gadget Corner. While both are quality products, the choice comes down to phone protection versus extra battery life.

Upgraded DuPont Analysis Worksheet

Computerized Investing offers its readers interactive analysis templates for analyzing and valuing stocks. For the last few months, we have been working to integrate real-time data into the DuPont Analysis (return on equity) worksheet. We are excited to release it to our readers. Instead of having to enter your own data manually, all you need to do now is enter in a ticker symbol and the worksheet automatically pulls in the required data from our new Thomson Reuters database. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the functionality of this worksheet or the others we have, or if there is a template you would like to see us create, please contact us at ci@aaii.com. In the coming months, we plan on integrating this auto-populate feature into our other templates, so stay tuned.

Online Discount Broker Survey

Each month, we pose a survey question to our readers on a variety of topics. This month, we are asking you to take a few minutes to answer a more detailed questionnaire related to your use of online discount brokers. The results of this survey will help us with our next online discount broker comparison we plan to run later this year. You can access the survey by clicking this link.