AOL has announced that it is planning to get rid of ailing social networking site Bebo. The internet giant said it was unable to provide the funds necessary to keep up with the bigger social networking sites. To that end, it will either be selling Bebo in the near future, or writing off the $850m (£417m at the time, according to the BBC) it paid for the site two years ago and shutting it down. AOL cited the explosion in popularity of sites like Facebook as a reason for the decision. Declining “Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant [...]

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AOL has updated its instant messaging app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch with entirely new features for the iPad. It’s obviously bigger, for one, which gives AIM a little more room to breathe, showing your active chats, the person you’re talking to and your contact list all in side-by-side panels. You can also keep up with your social networking feeds from sites such as Facebook and Foursquare, and upload pictures to AOL’s Lifestream service if you’re into that. While it’s a no-brainer for AIM to come to the iPad, it unfortunately highlights one of the devices [...]

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Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions. Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas [...]

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No executive job is safe in Tim Armstrong’s AOL, where he is still cleaning house and putting his own team into place. Even Bill Wilson, the architect of AOL’s let-a thousand-blogs-bloom content strategy which is a cornerstone of AOL’s new approach, is now being replaced as president of AOL Media by Armstrong’s former New York City Google colleague David Eun. “In a turnaround situation we are doing whatever is necessary to make the company successful,” Armstrong told me in a brief phone conversation. At Google, Eun most recently was in charge of content partnerships [...]

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During today’s AOL earnings call, which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search [...]

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AOL announced its first quarterly earnings today as a newly public company. Fourth quarter revenues dropped 8% to $471.6 million, and turned a profit of $1.4 million (see the slides below). Notes from CEO Tim Armstrong’s first conference call are below. He laid out AOL’s strategy, warned that sales would probably be dampened this quarter as a result of reducing a third of its workforce and noted that “AOL is not a quarterly project.”  He emphasized Aol’s content strategy, with the build out of AOL’s new content management system Seed and acquisition of StudioNow [...]

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AOL just released its financial results for 2009, its first as a standalone company since October 2000. The company reported a profit of $1.4 million, or a penny a share, compared with a loss of $1.96 billion, or $18.52 a share, a year earlier (when Time Warner wrote down the Internet giant). What caught our eye is that revenues are down 17% YOY, dropping from $974 million in Q4 2008 to roughly $810 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Zooming in on advertising revenue, Q4 revenues on that level dropped 8%, from $512.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 to $471.6 million in Q4 2009. Nevertheless, [...]

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In the midst of massive headcount cuts, another AOL exec is departing the newly-independent company. Ralph Rivera, previously the Vice President of AOL Games and AOL Latino, where he was responsible for AOL’s portfolio of online casual games and helped expand its international reach, is leaving to become President of Major League Gaming, Online. MLG is a small but growing professional competitive video game league. Rivera will be tasked to lead digital strategy and online product development for the growing company. Major League Gaming has shown strong growth in the past few years. The [...]

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When it comes to PR, there is damage control and then there is just plain cluelessness. Ten days ago, I found out that Aol’s chief technology officer Ted Cahall was planning to leave the company. Today, it became official. Even though our information was correct, Aol made repeated statements, on the record, that our story was wrong. To put it more bluntly, Aol lied to us, and also encouraged other news publications to say that our story was incorrect. When we contact a company representative about a story that is accurate, they will usually either confirm the story on or off record, or [...]

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Lots of announcements from AOL this morning: the company has acquired Internet video company StudioNow in a deal valued at $36.5 million in cash and stock, with a portion of the cash paid out over multiple years. In addition, AOL decided to confirm the news we broke last week about CTO Ted Cahall leaving the company, after vehemently denying it up until now. Finally, AOL has hired Microsoft and Google vet Jeff Reynar as Head of Technology for Engineering and Products in New York. Reynar will build out and manage AOL’s New York Technology Center and will focus on innovation for AOL’s content [...]

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