Items tagged with AOL
Remember that awful sound that would emanate from your dial-up modem every time you hopped onto the Internet? Most of us have since graduated to broadband bliss, at least those of us fortunate to live anywhere but the boonies. As it turns out, dial-up is still mildly popular, and whether that's by necessity or choice...
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One of the near-cardinal rules of Wall Street is that companies who dismiss their CEOs typically fall all over themselves to reassure investors that they're hunting for new candidates and/or have tapped great interim leaders to fill the gap. Yahoo has opted to take a different approach and is reportedly focused on...
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It's been a few months since we covered AOL's controversial new business strategy and surprising purchase of The Huffington Post. The company released its first quarter results earlier this week—is there any good news underneath the bad? A little, as it turns out. Global display advertising revenue (this refers to large, flashy ads)...
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After years of attempting to variously reinvent, reorganize, and recapture the market space it's been losing to Facebook, MySpace is out the door. This isn't a surprise—News Corp declared it was ready to sell the segment last February. Now the social networking site is actually on the chopping block. News Corp is quite profitable, but...
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As AOL looks to the future following its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post, a good chunk of the old regime will be left behind. AOL is in the process of handing out around 900 pink slips, which represents 20 percent of the company's workforce. All affected employees have already been notified, who according to All Things Digital,...
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Last week we reported on AOL's business plan for 2011 and how it appears to eschew content quality in favor of content quality. Today, the company announced that it's reached an acquisition agreement with The Huffington Post. For the price of $315 million, Arianna Huffington and her website's staff, professional journalists, and various contributing...
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It hasn't been a good month decade for AOL. A little over a week ago, The New Yorker published a profile of the company's CEO Tim Armstrong in which the author, Ken Auletta, dismissed most of the website's published content as 'piffle.' Worse, Armstrong admitted that the vast majority of the company's subscribers—some three million...
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This news clip from the Today show's archives is an interesting look at how awkward and uncertain the first discussions of the Internet on television actually were. On January 24, 1994, Katie Couric and Bryan Gumbel did a short segment on the massive "computer billboard" that's getting bigger and bigger all the time. The mind-blowing thing...
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On the eve of Facebook's rumored announcement of a Facebook Webmail product, AOL announced an attempt to rise its email product from the ashes of AOL'e email, which is seeing its user base rapidly decline: Project Phoenix. Project Phoenix can be accessed at phoenix.aol.com. It is invite only, at least for now. It's hard to see how a Webmail...
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As we move more and more toward "all things Google," it might surprise people to learn that Google's Gmail was, until recently, mired in 4th place among email vendors. That's where it was until new comScore estimates for July 2009. Yes, despite the way Gmail and Google Docs, and Google Reader, and the rest all work together, it's only now...
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Another big name is about to enter the webmail market and would be the third-largest provider the day it launches, TechCrunch reported today, citing unnamed sources.All the reason it would be so big upon launch is because all MySpace users would be assigned an e-mail address of [username]@myspace.com. The social networking site has about 125...
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AOL has launched an updated beta version of AOL Web Mail, http://beta.webmail.aol.com, offering users one of the most complete e-mail experiences available, with one-click access to Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts, customization capabilities and over-the-air mobile sync of AOL Calendar and Address Book. The new AOL Mail Web Suite also includes...
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Another day, another Yahoo! acquisition rumor? According to a terse report on Tuesday in the WSJ, ex-AOL CEO Jonathan Miller is trying to raise funds for a bid on Yahoo!, which may result in either a total or partial buyout of the company. Unlike the last such rumor we reported on, which came from the Times Online, and didn't mention any sources,...
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Remember when AOL was king of the Web portals and when it had over 30 million members? That was a good six or so years ago. The expression Web portal is now considered passé and AOL claims only slightly more than 8 million members today. But with a number of significant changes taking place on AOL.com, AOL hopes to regain some of its lost...
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A recent U.K. study by AOL finds that most online users are concerned about their online privacy and about providing personal details to Websites. No surprise there. In fact, the study found that 84 percent of respondents said that "they would not give away income details online." What to make then of the fact that 89 percent of those same...
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You probably recall AOL's 2006 leak of search user data, which actually was more like a flood. AOL published the search logs of 650,000 subscribers, which eventually resulted in some heads rolling, after the smoke cleared. Why not take a tack from Law and Order and rip a story from the headlines, eh? And that's what director Michael Alltop...
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Federal regulators continue to come down on hard on corporate executives they believe are involved with misrepresenting investors and analysts. The latest group to get collared were 8 executives from AOL Time Warner who are being charged with inflating the company’s online advertising revenue by more than $1 billion between 2000 and 2002.“Four...
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AOL has been synonymous with "get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers" for quite some time. Their massive revenue stream of dialup subscription money finally dried up completely a couple of years ago, and they desperately needed to find some other reason for people to look at their pages. They seem to have managed it the old-fashioned way;...
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In a somewhat surprising move, AOL has shelled out $850 million dollars to acquire social networking site Bebo. If you add Bebo's 40 million users worldwide to AOL's customer base for AIM and ICQ, AOL can now boast 80 million unique users. And AOL can show those 80 million users advertising while they're on their service. I imagine it's a...
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In a mildly comical turn of events, the people running Yahoo are apparently trying to patch together a merger with AOL as a sort of "poison pill" move that would make them unavailable for purchase by Microsoft. That seems unlikely, since Google owns a substantial share of AOL, so would likely run afoul of regulatory agencies as a de facto...
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Yahoo is an interesting entity. It has an enormous Internet presence, of course; 500 million visitors a month. But Yahoo seems like an audience without a show from time to time. Its share price has declined precipitously, losing half its value in the last two years; Google is killing them at Internet search; and social networking sites drag...
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Time Warner released its Q3 earnings report Wednesday, and boy does it look sad for AOL. In terms of subcribers, numbers dropped 5.1 million to 10.1 million, over a 33% drop in one year's time.According to Time Warner the firm’s revised strategy to refocus its business from subscribers to advertising is to blame for the subscriber loss. The...
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