Suddenly, AOL is a hot property

NEW YORK — A year ago, America Online Inc. was seen as an ailing dinosaur of the dial-up era, its Internet access business fading fast.

Now that it’s tapping into the online advertising boom by opening up its content to anyone who wants it, AOL is a hot property being courted by powerhouse suitors including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Comcast Corp.

Google and Comcast are said to be in talks about taking a joint stake in AOL for its Web portal. That follows discussions between Microsoft and AOL parent Time Warner Inc. about a possible partnership with the MSN online business.

Credit AOL’s decision to abandon its longtime strategy of exclusivity and unleash its rich array of offerings — concerts, news, sports and e-mail — to the World Wide Web for free, a model Yahoo Inc. drove to become the Web’s top brand.

“They were a company waiting to die,” industry analyst Rob Enderle said Thursday of AOL. “They’ve done some work to make the property more attractive. The portal strategy is what gave them a future. It’s nowhere near where it needs to be, but at least they’ve got one.”

With such successes as delivering seven separate video feeds from July’s Live 8 concerts — all without any meltdowns — AOL is no longer viewed as a drain on its parent even as AOL’s dial-up subscribers leave in droves for increasingly cheaper high-speed cable and DSL phone lines.

Indeed, AOL’s new strategy lets it tap the growing U.S. Internet advertising market, which jumped 26 percent to a record $5.8 billion for the first half of the year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And that’s only a fraction of the overall ad industry, meaning there’s still plenty of room to grow.

Time Warner’s chief executive, Dick Parsons, told an investor conference last month that accelerating AOL’s transformation into an advertising-driven business was a top priority and the best way to add value to Time Warner’s long-slumping share price.

Analysts say a Google-Comcast-AOL deal could benefit all parties and shows how well AOL has managed to shed its image as a dying business.