Okay, that’s not a headline you’re likely to see anywhere else this year. Be patient. You might recall that AOL bought Time-Warner in 2000, expecting to make staggering amounts of money off the synergies that TW’s broad pool of content and AOL’s huge on-line market would bring. Somewhat more recently (December 2009), and without any media observer I’m aware of noticing the logical problem inherent in the story, Time-Warner spun off AOL. That is to say, the subsidiary gave the parent-company turkey away to the stockholders. (Reminds me of the McDonnell Douglas takeover of Boeing, another disaster but one that may have a happy ending.)

Now, exactly what is AOL? We all know what it was, the mass-market internet-with-training-wheels for the turn of the century. The system so easy to use that if you had fifteen bucks a month and a computer, you could get online. More importantly, you could get your mother online and not have to walk her through such complexities as having a connection, a browser, and an e-mail client, each with its own desktop icon. (Yes, I can sneer, I set my mother up with an actual Windows NT system and taught her to use it.) In 2003, AOL crested at 26.7 million subscribers, now they’re down to 3.85 million. They claim display advertising sales is their real strength, but their ad revenue fell 26% last year, when pretty much any site that actually sold ads held steady or made decent gains. (Overall industry results? Up 17% per eMarketer.)

Even AOL’s peak wasn’t really a peak, it was the slow-growing backwater of new users that wasn’t yet ready for the real internet, so isolated from the primary market that it kept growing three years after the dot.bomb implosion. That year AOL Time Warner recognized a $99 billion loss based on writing off the absurd goodwill acquired in buying AOL. Then AOL’s paid-subscription walled-garden business model cratered. Imagine Ford after the peak years of the Model T, if they hadn’t actually made other cars. (Actually, Ford wasn’t ready for the drop either, but they had Henry Ford while AOL had Steve Case. Enough said.)

Huffington, who had the sense to get almost the entire deal in cash, now has the chance to carry on with building her content-based empire. She’ll be able to pick through the bits and pieces of the current AOL, supporting the strong properties and letting the weak sisters wither away. And when the last pieces of the old AOL have no more value at all, she’ll be the one in charge when the remants are swept out. There may even be one last piece that is still called “AOL”, allowing us to see the headline I proposed.