New, old media lines blur-AOL CEO
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AOL's new chief, Randy Falco, sees the  line dividing traditional and new media blurring even further  as he takes the reins of the online division of the world's  biggest media company Time Warner Inc.
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NEW YORK -- Time Warner Inc.'s new CEO Jeff Bewkes laid out his vision for changes at the media conglomerate Wednesday, including dividing AOL's online access and advertising businesses and possibly spinning off the rest of the company's cable division.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL has named Ron Grant president and chief operating officer (COO). Grant was most recently the senior vice president for operations at AOL's parent company, Time Warner, where he worked closely with President and COO Jeff Bewkes on strategy, digital initiatives and operations. As part of his duties, he was key to developing AOL's new strategy focused on advertising. His appointment was announced on Tuesday by AOL'sÂ newly installed chairman and chief executive officerÂ (CEO), Randy Falco, who had been president and COO of NBC Universal Television Group before being tapped to replace Jonathan Miller in the top job. Miller was ousted earlier this month after leading Time Warner's Internet division since 2002. AOL was already in decline when Miller became chairman and CEO and he was unable to arrest its slide, with cable and broadband Internet companies continuing to steal subscribers from AOL and its model based heavily on dial-up service. The company announced in August that it was restructuring that business model, turning the AOL site into a free portal with the aim of bringing in revenue from online advertising. AOL also said it would lay off up to 5,000 employees. Grant obviously is well aware of what he's getting into as he moves from the parent company to the subsidiary, where he previously was senior vice president of business affairs and development, managing a team in charge of business development. Grant's "deep knowledge" of AOL and the Internet market, plus his relationships with others at Time Warner are "critical" factors in AOL's change in strategy, Falco said in a written statement.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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AOL on Monday issued an update to its AOL Video service that it says will make it easier for users to find, watch, and share web videos.
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America Online Inc. yesterday put new leaders in senior posts and revamped its corporate structure, undertaking a sweeping overhaul just one month before the company plans to slash costs by firing more than 700 employees.
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News and information are reaching consumers in sometimes surprising ways, pushing providers to creatively adapt their output to address online demands, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley said Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Reactions to Time Warner Inc.'s decision to sack AOL LLC's chief executive officer (CEO) range from lukewarm endorsement to strident disapproval, as the industry tries to make sense of a move many observers find perplexing. Jonathan Miller, who guided AOL through a complicated transformation from an Internet has-been to a credible player, got his walking papers last Wednesday. Randy Falco, a TV industry veteran who was president and chief operating officer of the NBC Universal Television Group, will take over as AOL's chairman and CEO. "It's a strange move, because AOL is on the way up. Miller was responsible for turning around the ship successfully, so it's not clear to me why they're replacing him," says industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. Miller, named chairman and CEO in August 2002, had the difficult task of changing AOL's business model from one focused on dial-up Internet access subscriptions to one centered on online advertising. This involved tearing down AOL's "walled garden" and making freely available on the Web the content and services it previously reserved for paying members via its proprietary software. This leap of faith assumes AOL will make up and surpass with online advertising the revenue it will give up by abandoning its Internet access business. Early indications suggest the plan is working. Although in Time Warner's third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, AOL's revenue declined 3 percent, due to the shrinking access business, online advertising revenue increased 46 percent, faster than the industry average, which hovers between 33 percent and 37 percent. This prompted Time Warner officials and financial analysts to shower Miller and other AOL top leaders with praise. Privately, however, the recovery signs may have come too late and been underwhelming for Time Warner. At a time when an Internet startup like YouTube Inc. gets bought for $1.65 billion, Time Warner may have astronomical expectations for AOL that it didn't see Miller meeting. "Miller's accomplishment is that he transitioned AOL from a fee model to a free model, which gives AOL a future. The problem is that AOL remains a property in trouble, one that isn't performing particularly well, certainly behind Google and Yahoo. That has been the big disappointment. Today, if you have a [company with a] Web model, you're looking for a very rich return on investment," says industry analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group. But as it searches for bigger online ad growth with an Internet industry outsider as CEO, Time Warner risks turning AOL's recovery into a relapse. "Falco doesn't really know the business. That's going to be the problem: he's going to be learning on the job. It may not be a huge problem if he's packaging the company up for sale, but if he's going to try to run it, it's probably going to be a [long] learning experience," Enderle says. As learning goes, Miller is also credited with synchronizing AOL to varying degrees with key trends driving the rebirth of the Web economy, such as blogging, Internet search, digital music, online video and open-development platforms. Lately, he had been spurring AOL product teams to shift their philosophy from making simple yet integrated products and services to developing outstanding ones. "The emphasis today is to make stuff great," Miller said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco a week before he was dismissed. He added then that this focus is key if AOL wants to increase traffic to its Web sites, which in turn fuels its online ad business. Unlike his successor, Miller was no stranger to the Internet business when he joined AOL. He had been president and CEO of USA Interactive's USA Information and Services (USAIS), which included at the time businesses like Ticketmaster.com, Citysearch, Match.com, USA Electronic Commerce Solutions and Expedia.com. A Time Warner spokesman disputed claims that Falco is an Internet newbie, saying that at NBC he oversaw the launch of several Web sites, including one tied to the network's Olympic Games coverage , and of online initiatives, such as the joint portal for U.S. Hispanics that Yahoo and NBC's Telemundo network announced in May. Ultimately, however, Falco comes on board because of his ad sales and traditional media background. "His TV experience and advertising connections really dovetail perfectly with AOL's focus on video and advertising going forward," the spokesman said. "Randy Falco is the right person to take AOL to the next level." Falco will provide more details about what that "next level" goal is when he takes over at a yet undetermined date, according to the spokesman. Miller remains at AOL for now but will leave Time Warner at a date that also has yet to be determined, the spokesman said. At least one high-profile AOL official has decided to jump ship rather than work under Falco. Jason Calacanis, who sold his very successful Weblogs Inc. company to AOL last October and continued to run it as a stand-alone subsidiary, resigned on Friday, after writing on his blog about his disappointment over Miller's removal. Of course, there are precedents among Internet companies appointing chief executives from traditional media companies, like Terry Semel, who became Yahoo's CEO in 2001 after 24 years with Warner Bros., says James C. Goss, a media and entertainment financial analyst at Barrington Research. Whatever Falco does, it's clear his key mandate will be to leverage his experience in the TV industry to accelerate AOL's ad sales business. If he fails at that, his appointment will be seen as a major mistake. "Obviously, AOL has changed its stripes and this just seems like a reaction to the shift in its business, to have somebody as CEO who has a lot of experience in the media side and, from an organizational standpoint, with a large operation of that nature," Goss says. "This is reflective of the dramatic business model change and of the aspirations" that come with it. Be that as it may, some Internet industry observers remain befuddled. "From the outside, it doesn't seem to make any sense," Sterling says. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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In both a literal and symbolic move, AOL announces a move to New York and a new focus on the online-advertising market. But is it too little too late?
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Maybe I was a bit harsh last week when I was reminiscing about the days when AOL was a classic Rule Breaker. After all, Time Warner&#39;s (NYSE: TWX) online service has only lost 2 million net subscribers over the past year.
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For the most part, AOL's future plans are the same old story.
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JUST IN Time Warner is "looking hard" at selling off the internet access portion of its AOL division over the next year to year and a half, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons said on Tuesday.
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AOL is once again revamping its Netscape.com Web portal, dropping a year-old "social news" component in which visitors submitted and voted on news stories and blog entries to determine how they're ranked on the site.
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Don't bury AOL. It's not dead yet.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL launched a significant upgrade of AOL News on Tuesday, but it had to turn off some new features so that the site could handle a heavy flow of users. AOL News, a news aggregation site, became slow and unavailable in the afternoon for what an AOL spokeswoman said was a "brief period of time." At mid-afternoon, the site either didn't load or loaded very slowly for several IDG News Service staffers located in different parts of the U.S. AOL expects to reinstate the removed features progressively this evening and during the day Wednesday, the spokeswoman said. At press time, AOL News didn't seem to be experiencing any performance problems. The redesign gave AOL News a blog format that combines traditional news sources, AOL programming, and social news features, such as giving readers the ability to rate and share articles and post comments. Some of the social news features had to be pulled off the site at different points in the morning and afternoon to accommodate heavy traffic, said Lewis D'Vorkin, senior vice president of AOL News & Sports. He stressed that the revamped AOL News is in a beta phase, during which AOL is closely monitoring usage of all sections and features of the site and making the necessary adjustments. "We had large traffic today, some big stories, so we removed some of those [social news] features to better the performance of the site," D'Vorkin said. The site currently does have a feed from the company's Netscape social news site, which offers users a wide variety of interactive features. Having a hot new Web site crushed by a flood of Web traffic is almost a point of pride with the Web 2.0 set, but a company the size of AOL should be able to do better, said Rich Miller, an analyst with Web analysis firm Netcraft. "They've got so much infrastructure and have launched large services before, so if they're having trouble, I wouldn't be bowled over by their reliability," he said. Asked if AOL was caught by surprise by the intensity of Tuesday's traffic, D'Vorkin replied that it was not. "Nothing surprises me and nothing catches me off guard," he said. The AOL News redesign is groundbreaking as a "mass market" news site that adopts a blog format with a broad set of interactive, Web 2.0, social news features, he said. It brings together features that AOL has been testing and providing for several years, he said. "We have developed a very unique site," he said. "It's exciting to learn and present news in a vastly different way." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this story.
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America Online disses Microsoft's SenderID.
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America Online Inc. (AOL) is developing a new service that will let its members back up files from their PCs on AOL data centers, so that the members will be able to recover files either deleted accidentally or lost due to a hard drive failure, an AOL executive said.
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By ANICK JESDANUN  NEW YORK - AOL's chief executive announced yet another restructuring of the online company's corporate structure Monday, creating a senior position to market its brand while naming several executives who will report to a newly appointed deputy.