When AOL was at its highest value, the company was worth about $240 billion. Back in 2000 AOL purchased Time Warner for $164 billion as part of a merger structure. The new company would be called AOL Time Warner. The deal was announced on January 10, 2000 and was filed on February 11, 2000. The FTC cleared the deal on December 14, 2000 and the merger was completed on January 11, 2001.

AOL shareholders owned 55% of the merged company and Time Warner shareholders owned 45%. America Online’s Internet Service Provider division drastically declined. AOL Time Warner had to report a loss of $99 billion in 2002 which was the largest loss ever reported by a company. Steve Case ended up resigning from the Time Warner Board of Directors on October 31, 2005. Ever since then the future of AOL was unknown. Time Warner wanted to spin off AOL from their own company for a very long time.

That issue has officially been resolved today. AOL will be officially spinning off from Time Warner on December 9, 2009. AOL stock will begin trading the next day. Investors that have 11 shares of Time Warner will receive 1 share of AOL on the day that the stock goes public. Time Warner has a market cap of $38 billion so that gives AOL a value of $3.2 billion.

When AOL goes public, one of the brands that they will be leaving with Time Warner is celebrity gossip blog TMZ.com. TMZ was created out of a partnership between AOL and Telepictures Productions. Telepictures is a subsidiary of Time Warner. AOL and Telepictures split the revenues of TMZ evenly. In 2008, TMZ made about $12.7 million for AOL so the company made $25.4 million total for the year. Up until this September of this year, TMZ.com earned $12.4 million total.

AOL will trade under the NYSE with the stock symbol “AOL.” AOL was trading in the NYSE before it merged with Time Warner back in the day too. The full press release is available after the jump:

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Yesterday Michael Jackson died from a heart attack.

AOL’s TMZ first reported the story and spent all night covering the story as it developed.  As a result, TMZ’s traffic spiked and they had the capacity to keep the website online while their competition’s servers couldn’t handle it.

TMZ wasn’t the only one that had traffic spikes.  On Twitter over 5,000 messages were sent out per minute shortly after the Michael Jackson news story broke.  The number of tweets doubled according to Biz Stone.  AOL Instant Messenger and LiveJournal’s servers also took a big hit, causing a slowdown.  The Los Angeles Times website hit about 2.3 million pageviews in one hour after the news story broke.  Facebook status updates tripled from the average.

[via BusinessInsider/LAT]