AOL To Sell ICQ. In Related News, ICQ Still Exists
Old school IM service ICQ is said to be on the market and heading to Russia as AOL looks to flog its non-content based businesses as it breaks off from Time Warner.
According to multiple reports, ICQ could be sold to Russian company and Facebook investor Digital Sky Technologies for somewhere in the vicinity of $200-$300 million.
For those under the age of 30, ICQ was the first highly popular instant messaging client, sweeping the world well before the likes of Yahoo Messenger, MySpace, Facebook or Twitter did. AOL acquired ICQ for $287 million in 1998, and hasn’t really done much with the service since.
As noted in the headline, many would be interested to learn that it still exists. To be fair though, the ICQ.com site does have an Alexa rank of 299, although notably its rank comes primarily from Eastern Europe, particularly Slovakia, The Czech Republic, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Belarus and Bulgaria, making it a nice fit for a Russian company. It only just scrapes into the top 2,000 in the United States (1,915).
