AOL hired Tim Armstrong in 2009 as prominent Google Executive, who became famous for his effort on Google advertising platform, that will point aging company in right direction.
IMHO. By now he has been doing amazing job. He took company public ( NYSE:AOL ) , focused on most valuable assert of company in order to make up declining revenue of its dial-up assets. Based on past AOL acquisitions ( Weblogs Inc, GDGT , AutoBlog, Engadget ), AOL content business has been the most vivid part on AOL ecosystem, which was enough for AOL's CEO to set longterm strategy. AOL recently bought Techcrunch, as result of this strategy. And now, AOL bought Huffingtont Post for $300m and 5x of gross annual income, which is considered good buy.
Content creation is blooming and also very competitive, AOL has been facing fierce competition among other content creation farms, like Demand Media ( filed for IPO ). It would be had to maintain good profit margin unless we see huge merger. For, instance Yahoo has its core business based on content creation, but they have management that has non-web background ( referring to Carol Bartz ). On the other hand, we have AOL that has to distance itself from dial-up business and focus on strong parts of his business. They still have couple of years of pain until they establish sustainable content business. Way to speed up this process would be AOL - YAHOO merger and Tim Armstrong replacing Carol Barz as CEO of merged company.
It could be win-win solution for both companies. Yahoo will get firm executive and visionary, and AOL would establish its presence on Interwebs.
Bojan Babic
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