• paidContent.org, Friday, January 23, 2009 11:45 AM

A pair of write-downs was the only black mark on an otherwise strong fourth-quarter performance from search giant Google. With regard to its $1 billion investment in AOL in 2005, Google took a $726 million impairment charge. Google also took a $355 million charge on its investment in WiMAX provider Clearwire.

As paidContent's David Kaplan points out, considering that Google's AOL investment was worth 5% of the company at the time, the roughly 73% difference between then and now indicates that AOL's value has dropped from $20 billion to just $5.5 billion.

This, as Kaplan says, is much worse news for AOL than Google, since these are only paper losses for the search giant, which needed to secure the investment at the time in order to keep Microsoft from winning the rights to AOL's search business. However, for Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, Google's valuation all but dashes any hopes of selling the beleaguered Internet unit for $7 billion.

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