Published on: 2011-12-13 17:52:56

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Aol Re-org: Like Shuffling the Deck Chairs on the Titanic?

Aol is at it again. It is busy reorganizing and re-inventing itself while the world sits on the sidelines wondering where the whole thing is going to land. At least the dial-up business is going to be tucked away into another area of the company so we don’t have to watch that dry up and wither as well. According to Bloomberg AOL Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong plans to reorganize the company to combine its dial-up Internet access business with its Web services, including AOL Instant Messenger. The new AOL services group would be one of four business units to be created under the new structure, Armstrong said yesterday in an interview. The details will be presented to employees on Dec. 14, before the plan takes effect in January. The other three divisions will consist of advertising, local services and the Huffington Post media group, he said. Aol is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle while residing in a Rubik’s cube. No one can seem to figure out exactly what they are or when they might discover it themselves. They, along with Yahoo!, are remnants of the old guard of the Internet that has had trouble adapting to the rapid change the space has experienced over the past several years. Aol has placed an emphasis on local with Patch but how many of you are reading a local Patch for your local news? Please let us know! And then, of course, there was the acquisition of the online queen of using bloggers to make a fortune, Arianna Huffington. Could it finally end up that the real value of Aol is because they own HuffPo? What about TechCrunch? Can these properties be enough to help save the flagging company? Not likely. Time will tell but that is a tall order for anyone. Armstrong did say AOL has no plans to sell or spin off any part of its business, Armstrong said. In the coming months, the New York- based company (AOL)’s various offerings, including e-mail and videos, will be more closely tied together and targeted to individual users, he said. Ahem, Tim? Google is already doing this with the rest of the known world so you may want to try something else. So how are you using Aol these days? What Aol sites aside from TechCrunch and HuffPo do you frequent? What do you think the future holds for the company? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Aol Re-org: Like Shuffling the Deck Chairs on the Titanic?

Published on: 2011-11-16 21:29:00

Mark Armstrong founded his site, Longreads , in 2009. Using Twitter hash tags , the site simply aggregated user’s picks for the best long-form non-fiction on the web, offering a poor man’s content curation engine. Now, two years and thousands of stories later, Armstrong will be joining Nate Weiner’s Read It Later as editorial director, where he will collect and curate content for that app’s users. “Over the past two years with Longreads, I’ve learned so much about the importance of ‘time-shifting’ in helping make long-form content more accessible to more readers on the web. Read It Later now has nearly 4 million registered users, and I think there’s an incredible opportunity for publishers, curators and creators to use the platform in new and valuable ways. That will be my focus,” he said. “We’re in a golden age of storytelling right now on the web, and I think Read It Later is in a perfect position to support that work, across all major platforms. We’re excited about what’s next.” Mark (pictured) was the former director of content at Bundle . He noted that while this is a paid position with the company, he will continue running Longreads, supporting it through reader donations and subscriptions. Read It Later completed a $2.5 million funding round in July, including investments from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Google Ventures, and Founder Collective. The service has just under 4 million registered users and over 250 apps connect to Read It Later for offline reading. The Android and iOS apps see about 10,000 downloads per day. Mark and I started talking shortly after he launched Longreads. We would routinely have conversations about the space and our views on where it was headed. We never had an agenda or were working together at the time, but just enjoyed the thoughtful discussion. He just got it,” said Weiner. “So this year, after I raised and grew from one to many , Mark and I talked again and realized it was the perfect time to bring him on board. Mark is now helping forge new paths with publishers, writers, and developers who are interested in changing the way people consume articles, videos, and content online and off.” Luckily, even with all his responsibilities, Armstrong will still have a moment to peruse some long-form non-fiction. “Longreads is continuing as it always has: It’s an independent four-person company, and my role with Read It Later will allow Longreads to expand and improve our service to the community. Read It Later has been a huge supporter of Longreads since the very beginning, and what we do is very complementary. Also, in case anyone’s wondering, I’ve always operated Longreads alongside other content strategy work — so, yes, I’ll still have plenty of time to read,” he said.

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Thar’s Money In That Long-Form Non-Fiction: Longreads Founder Headed To Read It Later

Published on: 2011-06-24 18:19:15

I think you should check out this post I found for this blog. Read it here – Funny 2008 Internal Google Video About Youtube, Project Spaghetti And Tim Armstrong

In 2008 Google’s President of the Americas operation Tim Armstrong (now CEO of our parent company AOL) was pushing hard to get some two dozen advertising processes integrated into a single streamlined system. That project was called Project Spaghetti, and YouTube, which had been acquired in 2006, was a particular problem . The YouTube sales team, led by head of advertising sales Suzie Reider , was apparently less than thrilled with all the pressure Armstrong and Google were putting on them to get advertising products streamlined. They created this video, says the person who gave it to us, to blow off steam internally. The setting is “Mama Suzie’s” Italian restaurant. Customers are ordering all sorts of things, but the only thing the team will make is spaghetti. Near the end a waiter says “Mr. Armstrong isn’t going to be happy.” Suzie replies “You tell Mr. Armstrong, in San Bruno we make spaghetti.” It’s an inside joke kind of thing and this obviously wasn’t created for the public, but the YouTube team was clearly annoyed by the whole situation. The ending is “Don’t worry, they lived happily ever after…making dough.” The video is below: CrunchBase Information YouTube Suzie Reider Tim Armstrong Information provided by CrunchBase

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Original post:
Funny 2008 Internal Google Video About Youtube, Project Spaghetti And Tim Armstrong

This is a new article called AOL Adds ‘Devil’ Partners FoxNews and Others:

Published on: 2011-06-21 13:51:31

In Cannes, Huffington and Armstrong talk up mission to “humanize” web.

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Go here to see the original: AOL Adds ‘Devil’ Partners FoxNews and Others

This is a new post called AOL Adds ‘Devil’ Partners FoxNews and Others:

Published on: 2011-06-21 13:51:31

In Cannes, Huffington and Armstrong talk up mission to “humanize” web.

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Originally posted here:
AOL Adds ‘Devil’ Partners FoxNews and Others

Published on: 2011-05-04 15:13:20

I thought you would like this post I found for this blog. Read it here – Tim Armstrong Gives Some Project Devil Details

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is betting on the devil. Project Devil , that is. Those are the ad units on AOL properties (including TechCrunch), and now on Hearst sites as well , that take up all the ad spots with one campaign. Instead of 14 different ads on a page, the same space if all given to one advertiser. They are designed to be more engaging as well via the addition of maps, videos, and other interactive elements. In today’s first quarter earnings call, Armstrong told analysts: “On every single benchmark, Devil Ads perform better.” He then broke down some stats: compared to “industry benchmarks” (i.e. run-of-the-mill display ads), AOL is seeing 6.4X the engagement rate with Project Devil ads than standard ones (10 percent versus 1.5 percent engagement), 1.9X the click-through rate, and 3.4X the time spent with the ads for those people who do engage (47 seconds versus 14 seconds). Project Devil video ads are played twice as much as other video ads. If ads are AOL’s monetization engine, then Project Devil is the turbocharger. “Devil is currently a very small part of our inventory,” Armstrong says, “but a growing part of the revenue picture. We can use less inventory and get a bigger bang for the buck.” AOL needs as much bang as it can get. In the first quarter, AOL was still fighting a 17 percent decline in total revenues, with the subscription business down 24 percent, and search and contextual ads down another 21 percent. But there was one bright spot. Display advertising looks like it may have turned the corner for AOL, with 4 percent revenue growth overall and 11 percent growth domestically. Project Devil is a part of that. AOL eliminated 55 percent of its ad impressions by cleaning up its pages, and revenues still grew. The flip side of that is attracting a bigger audience on the content side. AOL si now the No. 2 online video publisher in terms of unique viewers. The Huffington Post alone grew 27 percent in traffic during the quarter, TechCrunch grew 19 percent, and Patch grew more than 100 percent off a small base (total unique visitors for Patch is now 6.5 million). The locally-targeted ads on Patch also do better than normal display, but that is another story and Patch still has a long way to go. AOL’s new initiatives with Project Devil, Patch, and video are promising starts. Now Armstrong needs to scale them up. CrunchBase Information AOL Information provided by CrunchBase

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Read more from the original source:
Tim Armstrong Gives Some Project Devil Details

Check out this informative post written by TechCrunch. It provides interesting digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2011-03-14 05:59:47

TechCrunch has learned that John Montorio has been named Culture and Entertainment Editor for Aol’s Huffington Post Media Group content division. Montorio is a 30-year veteran of two of the country’s biggest newspapers – the New York Times and LA Times – but that’s not why his hiring is news-worthy. It’s news-worthy because it represents a dramatic shift in favour of real journalism within Aol. Make no mistake there’s a battle raging for the soul of new media. Not the clichéd war between print and Web or between Silicon Valley and New York, but rather a series of internal battles being fought within nearly every publication. It’s the battle between  journalism and churnalism. One on side are things like Demand Media , The Aol Way and the seduction of cheap hackery that is designed simply to generate easy page views and to help investors to sleep at night. On the other side is stodgy, snobby, old-school journalism which needs to find a new online home if it’s to survive the decade. The latter carries with it the seduction of everything Woodward and Bernstein – and is the only way to really build a media franchise that stands for something and can demand Vanity Fair-like ad premiums. No company represents this tug of war more ably than our overlords at Aol, to the point where sometimes the battle rages within a single soldier. No sooner had ad sales guru turned CEO Tim Armstrong laid out his SEO-centric “Way”, and renamed the company’s media properties as “towns” ruled by “mayors” than he pulled an apparent 180, acquiring the Huffington Post and naming its founder Arianna Huffington as head of all content. Huffington quickly did away with towns, mayors and publicly distanced herself from Armstrong’s obsession with metrics over reporting. She’s thinning the piecemeal freelancer ranks in favor of pedigreed full-time editors and promising that college graduate journalists will be mentored by seasoned old hands, not just stuck at a desk rewriting dreck with an SEO-optimized headline. And while some commentators complained that the cull left some AOL properties with no editorial staff , that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the journalism side of the house. Bluntly put: while a number of some great journalists were caught in the cross-fire, some of Aol’s content sites deserved to be decimated. Or worse. Not even the dorky streets formerly known as TechTown are safe from fighting. The editors of Engadget are quitting en – slow – motion – masse , leaking all sorts of anti-Aol bile to Alley Insider as they go. Meanwhile at TechCrunch, we’ve explicitly been told the Aol Way doesn’t apply to us. Indeed, even though some TC writers – ahem – continue to throw bricks at Tim Armstrong’s content policies, we’ve never once had a memo asking us to curb or alter our editorial voice. Most writers at TechCrunch and Huffington Post didn’t seek out a job in the middle of this war, we were sold into it. But Montorio is stepping into this fray of his own volition. What was he thinking? In the best traditions of old media, we picked up a landline phone and called him. “It started with a wonderful conversation with Arianna,” he said, “if there’s such a thing as love at first sight on the telephone, we experienced it. We were of a single mind on so many things”. So far, so Match.com testimonial. But surely Montorio will at least acknowledge that, to a lot of his former print colleagues, his move represents a step over to the dark side? “I don’t know why old and new media view each other suspiciously,” he said. “We all have to stop talking about saving newspapers — the big question is how we’re going to save journalism. The Huffington Post is trying to build a great 21st century news organization.” On SEO foundations? “Content farming is about giving people what they want — great news organizations give the people what they need.  Trust me, over the past few years, advertisers have exercised tremendous influence over print journalism too… I’ve been in meetings where pressure from advertisers has directly affected editorial policy. Let’s just say, it’s very hard for print to shake its finger [at digital] and say ‘shame on you’. Online, though, there’s so much content that [SEO and journalism] can co-exist… with revenue from SEO paying for real journalism”. Try telling that to Bill Keller. Just days before Montorio’s hiring, the New York Times’ Executive Editor wrote a blistering editorial about the Huffington Post and AOL’s decision to buy it, saying that “buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is [like a company] announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.“ Indeed while everyone we spoke to for this story was glowing in their praise for Montorio (the NY Times’ Dean Baquet called him “a wonderful journalist” while the paper’s Arthur Gelb counts him “among the very best editors I worked with during my decades as a masthead editor”), we were at least expecting to hear some measure of Keller-style cynicism towards his new employer. In fact we found a surprising enthusiasm amongst the crusty old media elites to embrace the HuffPo and what it represents… “You have to be pretty stuck in the sand not to get [that blogs like HuffPo are the future]“, said Polk award-winning essayist Frank Rich , who worked with Montorio at the Times and who describes his new gig as “a huge coup for the Huffington Post.” Indeed, Rich credits his own decision to move from the New York Times to New York Magazine in part to the latter publication’s growing web presence. “The print version is increasingly an adjunct to the website” he said, predicting that print vs web will soon be “a distinction without a difference”. What’s especially interesting about Montorio’s hiring is that, rather than directing hard news, he’ll be heading up entertainment and culture – areas which have traditionally been SEO cash cows. Frank Rich describes his former colleague a brilliant editor of “back of the book” [culture, entertainment, city diary] stuff… He’s wonderful at conceptualization – anyone can create a book section or a culture section – but he knows how to make it ‘pop’.” Hiring someone with Montorio’s skills means one of two things for the Huffington Post: either a bold step away from Bieber-filled headlines towards quality coverage of the arts, culture and entertainment — or a train-wreck waiting to happen as Armstrong and the Aol bean counters try to force their “Lady Gaga pantsless in Paris” agenda. Isn’t Montorio concerned? “An editor of mine once said that the worst hire you can make is someone who fits right in. What you want is people who when they get in the pool, they change the water temperature. I want to change the water temperature. Sure there will be some people who don’t like it – who preferred the old temperature – but there will be others who take the opportunity to swim a little faster.” Tim Armstrong already had his work cut out for him to transition AOL from an Internet company which makes 80% of its profits from users who don’t know they don’t have to pay for dial up anymore to a thriving public company. But Huffington’s quest to transition the company’s content properties from slavish dependence on home page traffic, where content is frequently written to order for advertisers, into a profitable utopia of high quality journalism is far, far more ambitious. With Montorio’s hiring, Huffington’s vision has moved one step closer to reality. Like everyone at Aol who believes its possible to have both a paycheck and principles, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the thermometer.

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Originally posted here:
John Montorio Joins HuffPo: Journalism vs Churnalism Battle Rages On

Published on: 2011-03-11 02:25:58

“You be the rock star, we’ll be your stage.” – Aol billboard outside TCHQ “Hey, what’s going on? – Russell just got electrocuted.” – Almost Famous The re-invigoration of Aol continues apace today with the announcement by Tim Armstrong that 900 employees will be laid off before the afternoon is out. According to Wired , those canned include “veteran journalists from AOL’s top news sites, including PoliticsDaily, DailyFinance and Walletpop”. Or as AOL’s SVP of news put it : “I have just laid off dozens of the most talented journalists & product folks I know.” And, lest overpaid freelancers like me get too cocky, Tim had a nice fuck-you-very-much for us too. “Going forward, AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he wrote in an email leaked to Business Insider . Thank God I write books for a living, eh? To be fair, though, Armstrong’s grand plan for making Aol the world’s greatest content company isn’t limited to laying off “dozens of the most talented journalists and product folks”. According to a second leaked memo that’s just landed in my inbox, other proposed measures to improve the bottom line include… Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five. Ending the company’s popular “let’s burn all our money” Fridays. Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month “because those fucking idiots will buy anything.” Switching to premium rate “900” numbers for the company’s 40,000 mandatory weekly conference calls. Resisting the temptation to give buying Bebo “just one more shot.” Rebranding PoliticsDaily as BieberKittensandDirtyPornDaily. Encouraging local Patch journalists to increase revenue by sending 419 scam mail to their readers. Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.

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Original post:
Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman

This is an interesting article called Lissn Strips Down To Its Skivvies: Three Anonymous People Chat While Others Listen:

Published on: 2011-02-12 21:54:31

When Lissn launched on stage at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, we described it as sort of a “ broader Twitter meets a simpler Google Wave “. Well, like the latter, the idea behind Lissn never really caught on. By March of last year, the service decided to pivot a bit to be based more around individuals rather than specific conversations. But that didn’t really work either. So now, with version 3, they’ve decided to strip away basically everything. Founder Myke Armstrong says that they started removing features after hearing author Eric Ries talk about creating a “minimum viable product”. He determined that Lissn, at its core, was simply about conversations, not the people having them or the topics they’re about. So here we have the new Lissn, which is sort of like a Chatroulette for conversations now. If that sounds familiar, it’s a bit like what Omegle offers. And Armstrong isn’t shying away from that comparison. But he thinks it’s slightly more than that — he thinks it’s more like Twitter meets Omegle now. Essentially, Lissn now allows for three people to chat while any number of people can listen. The key is that all three people are anonymous except for two things: their location is shown (at the state level) and the site that they came from is shown (Twitter.com, for example). Eventually, the plan is to add other features as well. Armstrong calls three the “magic number” for these type of conversations based on what he observed through Lissn up until now. So will Lissn work this time around? The once red-hot Chatroulette angle cooled off almost as quickly. But some might say that was at least in part due to the exposed male

This is a good post called Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong Live At Federated’s Signal LA Conference [Video]:

Published on: 2011-02-08 17:05:02

By now, we’ve all heard the news that AOL has bought the Huffington Post for $315 million . It’s AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s largest acquisition to date and the deal brings Arianna Huffington over to the company as Editor In Chief in charge of all AOL properties, including Engadget, TechCrunch and others (read AOL’s internal memo about the deal here ). Arianna and Tim held a call for analysts and media yesterday but today at Federated Media’s Signal: LA event , the duo is taking the stage with John Battelle to discuss the newly formed partnership. We’ve embedded the livestream of their conversation here. CrunchBase Information AOL Huffington Post Information provided by CrunchBase

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Excerpt from: Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong Live At Federated’s Signal LA Conference [Video]