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 for YouTube and Google overall. At AOL, he will be president of AOL Studios as well, which comes from AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow. Armstrong expects Eun to bring more video to AOL sites. “You will see an expanded amount of video,” he says, “video we produce ourselves and video partnerships.” In particular, Armstrong wants Eun to “supercharge” content partnerships. Eun will also oversee Seed, AOL’s content management system.
Armstrong says he has no more plans to make more changes to AOL’s top ranks. He’s been putting his own team into place since he took the job, bringing in Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and mobile communications to replace longtime exec David Liu and more recently hired former Google engineer Jeff Raynar to head up engineering in New York. At the same time, CTO Ted Cahall and many other vets have departed. And AOL is still in the middle of laying off a third of its workforce, so the executive turmoil might not be over.
Wilson will remain through May. “Bill has done a great job,” says Armstrong, “and I will continue to lean on him.” Wilson was in charge of the AOL homepage and its 80 Mediaglow properties, including Engadget, DownloadSquad, and Joystiq. But the new properties have not grown fast enough to account for the decline in the homepage traffic. AOL’s overall visitor numbers have done pretty much nothing all year, ending at 111 million U.S. unique visitors in December, 2009, versus 110 million a year ago. And that was only after a nice uptick in December (see comScore chart below). “The key metric for our content organization is unique visitor growth,” says Armstrong.
Will Eun do any better? Armstrong sets expectations low, warning that the overall numbers “may show up or down in terms of trading properties in and out,” but that what he will be focussed on is winning audience in the right categories.
Bill Wilson is Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Townsquare Media, a radio station company. Previously he was the President of MediaGlow at AOL. Prior to this role he was Executive Vice President of Programming at AOL. He is responsible for user experience in all of AOL’s content sites, which include News, Movies, Lifestyle, and Celebrity Gossip. He is also responsible for user experience at a number of blog sites such as Engadget and...
As President of AOL Media and Studios, David Eun oversees AOL’s network of content sites, as well as the SEED.com publishing platform, the StudioNow video platform and AOL’s New York City and Los Angeles studios. In this role, Eun is responsible for AOL’s efforts to build one of the strongest large-scale journalistic organizations while becoming the leading publisher of high-quality content and journalism in the world. Eun joined AOL from Google, where he was responsible for global business development efforts...
AOL is a global advertising-supported Web company, with display advertising network in the U.S., a substantial worldwide audience, and a suite of popular Web brands and products. The company’s strategy focuses on increasing the scale and sophistication of its advertising platform and growing the size and engagement of its global online audience through leading products and programming. History of Aol: AOL was founded in the early 1980’s as Control Video Corp, with an online service, Gameline, for the Atari 2600 console. ...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
