How hard the mighty fall

In a regulatory filing on Wednesday, Time Warner announced plans to spin off AOL, the fallen-from-grace online subscriptions giant that absorbed Time Warner in 2000.

AOL's ad revenue fell 20% in Q1 — a major blow to Time Warner, which posted a $16 billion loss in Q4 of 2008. This year also witnessed Time Warner's first annual loss since 2002.

In Q1, Time Warner saw revenue fall 7% to $6.95 billion. Profits fell 14% to $661 million, due in part to lower revenue in publishing and film; as well as charges from last month's spin-off of Time Warner Cable.

AOL remains the fourth-highest trafficked online property in the US, just behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. It served 104 million uniques in March (via comScore). But the company's suffered some relevance pains: in January it cut 10% of its workforce — 700 employees. And it recently cut CEO Randy Falco out of the picture, replacing him with ex Google ad exec Tim Armstrong.

Time did not reveal an ETA for when AOL would be spun off, but it did relate plans to buy back the 5% of AOL equity presently held by Google.