Posts Tagged ‘aol’

AoL recently reported year over year total revenue decrease of 23 percent, with ad revenue taking a 28 percent dip, and subscriptions down 11 percent. What drove the drop in ad revenue were declines in search, contextual and display revenue across the various properties, as well as lower revenue from its Third Party Network.

The company’s earning release explained the advertising drop this way:

” AOL Properties revenue reflects the continued declines in search queries, due primarily to a 26 percent year-over-year decrease in domestic AOL subscribers (who tend to search more frequently than non-paying visitors) and the removal of various contextual links during the quarter….Domestic display revenue declines largely reflect a disruption in sales associated with a reorganization of the salesforce during the quarter…[and] efforts to improve the user experience by reducing the number of ad units displayed on a page.”

The News Tribune reported on AoL’s plans to sell assets in order to focus on U.S. ad sales.

As pointed out by PaidContent.org, the incubator projects backed by Betaworks of New York City read like the “who’s who” of online startups.

Now The New York Times Company, AOL Ventures, Intel Capital, RRE Ventures and others have contributed $20 million as a second round of funds. Its first round brought in $8 million.

This money will help grow current projects that include Bit.ly, Twitterfeed, TweetDeck, Stocktwits, Chartbeat, DailyBooth, Hot Potato, Tumblr, UserVoice and Outside.in. It will also help new start-ups with incubation, investment or acquisition.  Betaworks is majority owner of Twitterfeed.

While today is the day AOL becomes AoL., a company independent of Time Warner, the old name and logo are still on the site. Seed.com beta has finally launched, however, and its first hire has just been announced – by the hire himself, on his own blog.

Saul Hansell, formerly of The New York Times, will be join AOL as Programming Director, reporting to Mike Rich, SVP AOL Entertainment. His responsibility will be leveraging Seed across all of AOL’s platforms.  

Saul joined The New York Times in 1992 and most recently was covering the telecommunications beat, including wired and wireless communication of voice, data and video, including companies involved in telephone, Internet backbone, cable TV, Internet video, cellphone handsets, and other devices connected to networks, as well as communications policy and privacy. Launched in 2007, he was the founding editor of Bits, a blog on nytimes.com covering a wide range of technology topics with particular interest in Internet media, digital marketing, consumer electronics and the evolving business models for music and video.

For more on what Seed is all about, see AIM Group’s earlier post on the changes at AOL.

After much study including e-mails from consumers, AOL executives have decided to retain the AOL name but to write it AoL., with a period at the end.  They’ve also designed six new logos (so far) which will display on the new corporate site Dec. 9, when it breaks from Time Warner.  Silicon Valley Insider’s article shows, with commentary, the six logos just revealed by AOL.

“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL chair and CEO, in the announcement. “Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade.”

AOL has recently told its employees that it needs 2500 of them to voluntarily resign, as a way to save $300 million. Without volunteers, involuntary layoffs will occur. The details of the layoff plan were recently published on Silicon Valley Insider.

Jason Calcanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo.com, created an IPO strategy that the new AoL. will follow closely. Calcanis has stated that he plans to buy $250,000 in AoL. stock after it becomes available to the public.

“I believe Tim Armstrong is a great executive who understands the new publishing model, and he is a consumate sales person from what I understand,” Calcanis told Silicon Valley Insider. “ The biggest challenge for AOL is getting direct traffic, which is to say “traffic that you earn,” as opposed to traffic from their homepage. They are well aware of this. The way you get direct traffic is to have a visionary–and at times unreasonable–editorial leader like Nick Denton, Rupert Murdoch, Jann Wenner or Si Newhouse. Right now AOL has great editorial talent, but clearly they don’t have that person.” 

UPDATE: Here’s the video of the new AoL. branding

Brad Garlinghouse, the former Yahoo executive who penned the legendary “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” has been hired to expand AOL’s e-mail and instant-messaging services as president of AOL’s Internet and mobile communications.

As SVP, Garlinghouse had similar duties at Yahoo when in 2006, he expressed a litany of corporate problems in an internal memo, noting that Yahoo had spread itself too thin, like peanut butter. When his memo — part rant, part cheer — leaked publicly, it became known as the “Peanut Butter Manifesto.” It also served as a catalyst and blueprint for Yahoo’s eventual restructuring.

AOL is certainly in restructuring mode; Time Warner is spinning it out by the end of the year. Most recently, Garlinghouse was senior adviser at Silverlake Partners.

AOL has promoted the VP and COO of its Bebo social media unit, Stephane Panier to head the group’s global operations. Panier will report to directly to Jon Brod, EVP of AOL Ventures, Bebo’s new home within AOL.

The move suggests that rumors AOL will sell Bebo – which it acquired only last  year for $850 million – may not be accurate.

Brod called Panier “the ideal leader to build on Bebo’s existing successes, to chart a course for its future, and to execute against that vision.”

Panier, like new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, came from Google where he worked for six years in senior finance and operations positions.

It was a marriage that never really worked, but you have to give them credit for trying as long as they did. Time Warner said it’s spinning off AOL into its own publicly traded company, calling it quits after eight years.

Time Warner owns 95 percent of AOL. A 5 percent stake is held by Google. The company said it would buy out Google’s share in Q3.

“For AOL, becoming a standalone company will give it more focus and strategic flexibility,” Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes was quoted at the annual shareholders’ meeting Thursday in New York. He indicated that TW will focus on its movies, magazines and cable TV networks, which include HBO and CNN.

In 2001, AOL bought Time Warner for a staggering $147 billion. It went downhill from there. Over the next two years, AOL Time Warner absorbed nearly $100 billion in debt as the combined company’s value plummeted. Time Warner eventually kicked AOL execs out of the corner offices and removed AOL from its name. Its market value today is about $27 billion.

The “divorce” will separate AOL to be run by former Google Inc. advertising executive Tim Armstrong. Armstrong was hired in March to try to restore the AOL brand, which has been eclipsed by Google, Yahoo and MSN. It still draws millions of views to its content and ad networks and is on track to earn an estimated $1 billion in 2009, mostly in ad revenue. America Online, its dial-up Internet service, has been decimated by cheaper and faster services from phone, cable and mobile services. It peaked in 2002 at about 23 million subscribers. Last quarter, it had about 6 million.

Jonathan Miller is not a candidate for the CEO job at Yahoo and isn’t pushing to buy the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. The former chief of AOL and a partner at the venture capital firm Velocity Interactive Group is said to be scoping out new media investments at a time when spending in that space is dropping.

Miller wouldn’t comment on his reported involvement with Yahoo. But he did say in an interview that he wants to own companies that cater to people who watch television and read the news online.

In July, Miller made headlines when Carl Icahn named him as a potential director for Yahoo when the billionaire investor was seeking to oust the board.

Speculation about Miller’s possible move to Yahoo has certainly helped the beleaguered search engine and portal. Yahoo shares rose after the Wall Street Journal said on Dec. 2 that Miller might pursue a takeover of the company. Ashley Huston, a Journal spokeswoman, said the paper still stands by the story.

Some of the projects Miller has been working on include Next New Networks, an Internet video publisher (the automotive news program Fast Lane Daily is their flagship content – we covered the company in CIR 8.13), as well as FatTail which helps companies manage their advertising inventory.

Curtis G. Viebranz, the former CEO of Tacoda and president of AOL’s Platform-A, has been named to the Board of Directors of Peer39 which focuses on online semantic advertising to match ads and content. Peer39 has a development team in Israel. Other board members include Warren Lee of Canaan Partners, Ned Carlson, a managing director of Dawntreader Ventures, and Daniel T. Ciporin, the former chairman and CEO of Shopping.com and a partner at Canaan Partners.

Viebranz joined Tacoda as president & chief operating officer in April 2004. In July of 2006, he was named chief executive officer where he helped increase Tacoda sales by over 1000 percent and more than quintupled the size of its staff. He was one of the company’s original investors.

AOL acquired Tacoda in 2007.