Monday, September 10, 2012

AOL: THE HOUSE THAT TIM IS BUILDING

Former Google key man Tim Armstrong is cutting deadwood, exploring new businesses and being trigger happy like how. But his current assignment at AOL could prove to be a career killer. 

But when on September 29, 2010, AOL acquired three Internet startups – namely TechCrunch Inc., 5Min and Thing Labs – reportedly for an amount of over $100 million, it had even the most supportive analysts questioning Tim’s logic in the acquisition. Apparently, this is a move on the part of AOL to become a pure content based entity. According to Armstrong, even though the subscription business still generates a major chunk of their revenue, it is mostly on a decline. As the new content strategy is supposed to work on the mechanism of affiliating advertisers to the content, AOL is planning to invite marketers to work with its editorial team and produce customised content. With this, Tim hopes that ad money will follow suit.

Unfortunately, even if this does work, the fact is that Tim is relocating resources in a suspiciously unproductive manner, and even a seat-of-the-pants analysis is enough to give the reasoning.

After the Time de-merger, AOL was and is basically left with two businesses – subscription and advertising. Subscription, the business responsible for generating almost all of the company’s profits (as per the latest SEC filings by AOL) is alarmingly declining by 30% per annum. It constitutes almost 25-50% of AOL’s web traffic. The advertising business, which consists of a $600 million deal with Google and is powered by the subscription business (due to w


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
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