Digital Sky Technologies, the largest internet firm in Eastern Europe has agreed to buy instant messaging platform ICQ from AOL at a cost of $187.5 million. The platform, while not the most popular in the United States is still considered the most popular in Russian and various other parts of Europe.

AOL recently announced a 58 percent drop in profits and was eager to offload services they didn’t fully support. Digital Sky also owns a stake in various other internet firms, including Facebook app creator Zynga, makers of Farmville.

ICQ was purchased by AOL in 1996 and offers support in 16 languages. According to Electronista:

ICQ has over 32 million unique visitors per month. It has a large presence in Russia, Germany, Czech Republic and Israel, but has lost much of its traction in North America and Europe to AIM and Windows Live.

Does anyone in the U.S. still use ICQ, let us know, just out of curiosity.

Russian Firm Buys ICQ From AOL For Nearly $200 Million is a post from: The Inquisitr

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).

AOL To Sell ICQ. In Related News, ICQ Still Exists is a post from: The Inquisitr

I don’t think there is a person on the net today who has been online for more that 10 or 15 years who doesn’t hold up their low number count ICQ ID as some sort of badge. While I can’t remember my ID number I do remember that it was one of the first programs I downloaded when I started using the web.

Well as being reported by Kara Swisher it seems that AOL has decided that the time has come to get rid of this once proud jewel that it paid $287 million in 1998. While ICQ may seem so old school in the day and age of social media, Twitter and Facebook it is still apparently profitable.

While ICQ may live in the shadow of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo in the States it is a different matter in Europe where it is number one in Germany, Russia and Ukraine as well as Israel and other smaller countries.

Apparently it is due to interest in ICQ by two major non-US companies that has prompted AOL to hire Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co to handle any deals regard the possible sale of the company once AOL’s spin-off from TimeWarner.

AOL to sell off ICQ is a post from: The Inquisitr