Tim Armstrong

We ran this post a cou­ple of weeks ago. In light of the lat­est re­port that AOL just hired ad­vi­sors to help it fig­ure out how to grow faster and merge with Yahoo, it seemed to make sense to run it again... The two strug­gling Internet giants of the 1990s, Yahoo and AOL, should merge. Immediately. (In fact, it's ridicu­lous that they haven't al­ready). This idea isn't new--we've been call­ing for it for three years, and, ac­cord­ing to Kara Swisher, "big in­vestors" are now call­ing for it, too. (...)

AOL and Yahoo have not held for­mal talks about merg­ing, but they have held a few in­for­mal talks about the talk about the two com­pa­nies merg­ing. Buried in Kara Swisher's re­port on AOL-Yahoo, she re­veals that there has been "a call or two be­tween AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on how to han­dle the hub­bub." She doesn't have any­thing else about the call. Just that it oc­curred. We would have loved to hear Bartz on that one. Was she chew­ing out Armstrong, or was she ca­su­al? (...)

AOL has hired fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sors to ex­plore all its op­tions, in­clud­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of com­bin­ing forces with Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal re­ports. The AOL-Yahoo talks have been sim­mer­ing for about a mon­th now, but noth­ing has re­al­ly hap­pened. One rea­son? It's would be a very com­pli­cat­ed trans­ac­tion, Kara Swisher of All Things D re­ports. One big time in­vestor who looked at the two com­pa­nies says, "It looks great con­cep­tu­al­ly and ev­ery­one gets all hot and both­ered...But when you (...)

While a merg­er of AOL and Yahoo is a fer­vent dream of bankers look­ing for fees, the re­al­i­ty is a lit­tle more–shall we say–pre­ma­ture. In fact, it’s like­ly it was just those deal­mak­ers, look­ing to gin up some ac­tiv­i­ty, who are be­hind the lat­est spin-rif­fic ar­ti­cle in The Wall Street Journal that re­ports on machi­na­tions by AOL to hire un­named ad­vis­ers to car­ry out all kinds of com­plex deals. Actually, it is the com­plex­i­ty of any of those deals that has put a lot of the takeover, buy­out, merg­er (...)

AOL Inc.'s prof­it grew in the third quar­ter thanks to gains on in­vest­ments it sold dur­ing the quar­ter, but rev­enue de­clined sharply as on­line ad sales fell and its and its di­al-up Internet ac­cess busi­ness con­tin­ued to fal­ter. Nonetheless, the com­pa­ny's re­sults seemed to give in­vestors some re­as­sur­ance that AOL is on the right track in its plans to turn its busi­ness around. Shares rose $1.60, or 6.3 per­cent, to $26.89 in morn­ing trad­ing. The trou­bled Internet com­pa­ny has strug­gled since (...)

It may not look pret­ty, but this chart shows AOL's core dis­play-ad busi­ness is ac­tu­al­ly sta­bi­liz­ing a bit. Yes, the over­all rev­enue pic­ture is as bleak as ev­er (search and sub­scribers are still tank­ing). But, just be­low that, the do­mes­tic dis­play ad busi­ness is up slight­ly from last quar­ter. (Year over year, it's still down.) Tim Armstrong still has a long ways to go be­fore he hits his promised tar­get of dou­ble dig­it growth in the dis­play busi­ness. But for a com­pa­ny that has done noth­ing (...)

AOL man­aged to turn in bet­ter-than-ex­pect­ed rev­enue and prof­it num­bers for its third quar­ter to­day, but much of the bot­tom line im­prove­ment came from one-time gains due to as­set sales as the com­pa­ny re­struc­tures. Meanwhile, ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue — which con­tin­ues to sup­ply much of the web giant’s cash — fell off an­oth­er small cliff, drop­ping by 27 per­cent across all of AOL’s prop­er­ties. In other words, even as CEO Tim Armstrong tries to turn the ship around, it’s still tak­ing on wa­ter in a num­ber (...)

While AOL (NYSE: AOL) man­aged to ar­rest the de­cline of its U.S. dis­play rev­enues in Q3, the “hard work” that CEO Tim Armstrong has re­peat­ed­ly re­mind­ed in­vestors of still has a ways to go. Display was down just 8 per­cent—but that’s amid a sig­nif­i­cant broad­er turnaround in ad spend­ing. For ex­am­ple, by way of com­par­ison, Yahoo’s dis­play ad sales were up 17 per­cent last quar­ter. Overall, with the European busi­ness still be­ing re­built (in­ter­na­tion­al dis­play fell 54 per­cent), AOL’s to­tal dis­play (...)

AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong be­gan the com­pa­ny’s Q3 earn­ings call talk­ing about a three-pronged strat­e­gy around dis­tri­bu­tion. That in­cludes “com­mu­ni­ca­tion prod­ucts” like AOL mail, search, so­cial me­dia and its home­page, which was re­vamped this week. He al­so talked of “con­tent ex­its,” which are built off of the dis­tri­bu­tion. “It’s not just build­ing more con­tent sites, but busi­ness mod­els around the­se ar­eas,” he said. Aware of in­vestors’ low ex­pec­ta­tion­s—AOL man­aged to beat an­a­lysts’ (...)

Money is flow­ing back in­to Internet ad­ver­tis­ing, but not at AOL: Tim Armstrong’s com­pa­ny saw ad rev­enue drop 27 per­cent in the last quar­ter. The good news for Armstrong is that he has now con­di­tioned Wall Street to ex­pect the­se drops, as he works on a turnaround ef­fort that be­gan in the spring of 2009. And be­cause some of the ad drop is “self-in­flict­ed”–the re­sult of AOL’s de­ci­sion to fo­cus on quan­ti­ty in­stead of qual­i­ty as it re­vamps its ad team and strat­e­gy–it’s pos­si­ble to add a more (...)

Some of the sto­ries peo­ple are talk­ing about this morn­ing: » For the first time last night, the New York Times went live via on­line video from its news­room with re­ports and com­men­tary on the mid-term elec­tion. [Beet.tv] » The Washington Post seems to be­lieve it’s learned its lessons from the abort­ed hy­per­local site LoudounExtra after two years. The pa­per is look­ing to cre­ate a series of mi­cro-lo­cal sites. (...)

After ac­quir­ing Weblogs, Inc. in 2005, AOL is ru­mored to be seek­ing to pur­chase the TechCrunch em­pire found­ed by Michael Arrington. AOL, the New York-based on­line me­dia com­pa­ny, is on the verge of ac­quir­ing TechCrunch, the on­line blog­ging net­work start­ed by former at­tor­ney, Michael Arrington. The deal is at a sen­si­tive stage and might fall apart yet, but I don’t think so. Sources fa­mil­iar with both en­ti­ties says that the an­nounce­ment is like­ly to come on­stage at Disrupt, TechCrunch’s (...)