AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported its Q1 results for the quarter, and it’s a mixed bag, with sales of $539 million, up 2%, beating Wall Street estimates, with diluted earnings per share coming in at $0.32. Analysts were expecting revenues of $537.15 million, with First Call’s EPS estimate of EPS at $0.32. Still, Q1′s EPS number is up 45% on the same period a year ago. Net income was up… → Read More
Fortune reported earlier today that Mike Brown Jr. and much of the team that ran AOL’s venture funding arm have formed their own VC firm — Bowery Capital — that aims to find and fund enterprise-friendly startups. While it’s somewhat heartening to see a new firm set up shop in New York City, there’s another weighty question here that hasn’t been answered yet: now that nearly all of its… → Read More
Online video is booming, and today AOL (owner of TechCrunch) unveiled three new initiatives that spell out how it plans to tackle it: 15 original, unscripted shows; a new creative studio, Be On, to create branded videos; and a deal with FreeWheel and Mediaocean to add in AOL’s video inventory to its platform, so that media buyers looking for multiscreen investments across TV and online video can… → Read More
While there’s still few details and no official announcement, AOL is shutting down its AOL Music news properties and is firing their employees, according to tweets from the official AOL Music site Spinner’s account and some staff. Poor performance due to competition from independent bloggers may be to blame. However, reports indicate Winamp, Shoutcast, and flagship music blog Spinner may survive. → Read More
Aol CEO Tim Armstrong sang the praises of programmatic, automated advertising today during his keynote presentation at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco, and he announced a new Marketplace tool to help publishers manage their ads. So when Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky took the stage to interview him, he asked: Was it meaningful that Armstrong didn’t talk about Aol’s content and publishing… → Read More
Much like this gif, Aol added another layer of management last week. Aol Brands got its own CEO, Susan Lyne, to round out the triumvirate of Aol Networks CEO Ned Brody and interim Membership CEO Bud Rosenthal. And, in an impressive sleight of hand, the company also lost a layer of management, with COO Artie Minson out, perhaps due to Patch’s less-than-inspiring performance. → Read More
Aol today confirmed a couple of big changes at the top of the company, as first reported yesterday by Bloomberg and AllThingsD. Susan Lyne, the exec who had previously been at Gilt Groupe, is the new CEO of Aol’s Brand Group (including TechCrunch). Meanwhile, Artie Minson is stepping down as COO as the role gets restructured. → Read More
AOL (owners of TechCrunch) today is taking one more step to build out its content empire: it has officially confirmed the acquisition of technology reviews site gdgt — first reported by TechCrunch nearly two weeks ago. Gdgt itself is announcing the news on its own site, and a spokesperson from AOL has also confirmed the news to TechCrunch directly. → Read More
AOL’s Q4 earnings today saw that company (which owns TechCrunch) finally make a turnaround, after 8 years of decline, into revenue growth, with overall sales of $599.5 million. But there are still a lot of areas that are seeing flat or declining revenues, and some that are loss-making: among those is AOL’s hyperlocal effort Patch. On the investor call today, CEO Tim Armstrong admitted that the… → Read More
AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported earnings for Q4 2012: revenues came in at $599.5 million on earnings of 41 cents per share. That matches analysts expectations on EPS but beats on revenues of $573.1 million. The figures show that after years of decline, the company continues to get back on track with revenue growth. → Read More
About.me, the personal profile page startup founded by Tony Conrad and acquired days after its public launch by AOL back in 2010, is going it alone again. The move was announced on about.me’s blog. Conrad said AOL’s acquisition strategy is “very focused on media” — and there just weren’t the product integration opportunities that had originally been envisaged between about.me and AOL. → Read More
One of the high points of last week’s DLD Conference in Munich was the What’s Next? panel which explored the future of media in the digital age. Buoyantly chaired by DLD host Yossi Vardi, the panel included longtime media exec Jon Miller, whose illustrious career includes stints as Chairman and CEO of AOL and Chief Digital Officer at News Corp. → Read More
You know, I love Aol. I seriously do. The company has some stellar health and dental benefits, and they brought Mike and MG back and there are definitely some individuals who work there that go above and beyond what’s necessary in being thoughtful, generous and helpful (hello Trisha Dearborn, you saint you!).
It is also pretty great to have someone, anyone, pay you to write about technology… → Read More
Like Scrooge after discovering the True Spirit Of Christmas, AOL is offering a shiny half-crown (worth $1,056) to the little boy (its employees) as thanks for bringing the prize Turkey from the Poulterer’s this holiday. The $1,000 cash bonus is a celebration of the company’s $1.056 billion patent sale it made earlier this year. I rarely, if ever, comment on internal AOL stuff but this… → Read More
AOL just announced that it has acquired Buysight, a startup offering ad targeting and retargeting.
The startup will become part of the Advertising.com group, which includes AOL’s various ad platforms, such as Advertising.com, ADTECH, The AOL On Network, goviral, and Pictela. (AOL also owns TechCrunch.) In the acquisition press release, the group’s CEO, Ned Brody, said Buysight’s technology will… → Read More
AOL (owner of TechCrunch) reported earlier today its quarterly earnings for Q3 2012 ending September 30. The results beat expectations with a flat revenue of $531.7 million compared to Q3 2011. It’s the first time in over seven years that revenue isn’t declining. Net income was $20.8 million compared to a net loss of $2.6 million in the same quarter last year. Diluted earnings per share were… → Read More
A year ago sucked. I mean, it was actually great, but it sure seemed to suck at the time. We were getting CrunchFund off the ground and I think everyone thought we were going to do that in full conjunction with Aol — they were and are the largest limited partner of the fund, after all. → Read More
The way we use email has changed dramatically in the past decade-plus — written down like that, it seems like an almost laughably obvious statement. But David Temkin, AOL’s senior vice president of mail and mobile, argues that email clients haven’t kept up with the changes — with the last major innovation coming in 2004, when Gmail launched.
Given its age, and its association with the… → Read More
ComScore just published its latest U.S. search market numbers and things aren’t looking too good for Yahoo. Yahoo’s Bing-powered search lost another 0.6 percentage points and now has just 12.2% of the market. That’s down from 12.8% in August and 13% in July and June. → Read More
AOL’s On Network, which is the company’s distribution and syndication network, has steadily grown the number of videos in its library, as well as the number watched each month by viewers. It’s now Number 2 among video properties on comScore’s Video Metrix, and is now making its video library available on more devices. The network is rolling out new native mobile and tablet apps for iOS and Android… → Read More
HuffingtonPost continues ahead with its international expansion: the news blog today formally announced its Italian edition, L’Huffington Post, in partnership with Italian newspaper publishers Gruppo Espresso, adding to a stable that includes, in addition to the U.S., sites in the UK, Canada, France and Spain. But for a company that has built its business partly on a quick turnaround of the… → Read More
Many sites want to offer video, but they can’t afford their own studio or a quality video production team. Magnify entered the picture in 2007 to give publishers and brands the opportunity to offer curated video experiences, along with providing them with the tech to upload and share videos, create playlists, offer commenting, reviewing, content controls, analytics and monetization options.
Of… → Read More
TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington sat down with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – yes, the CEO of the same company that Arrington sold the blog he created to two years ago (…before later being forced out). The last time the two were on stage together was when AOL bought TechCrunch, in fact. Arrington started off by complimenting Armstrong on tripling the AOL stock… → Read More
Well, that’s that then. All the talk a while ago about AOL possibly merging with Yahoo is officially off the table for now, according to AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong.
“I’ve never talked to Marissa [Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo] about merging AOL and Yahoo,” he said, speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today. Nor did he deny that it was something that had been discussed with… → Read More
Here’s a timely story on how other companies not called Apple are also profiting from tech patents. Today AOL announced a share repurchase of $600 million in AOL stock, along with a one-time cash dividend of $5.15 per share, as the final steps in returning all of the proceeds from its $1.1 billion sale of patents to Microsoft.
The news was announced to the market, as well as to AOL staffers by… → Read More
Last week The New York Times ran a story by John Markoff about robots replacing human workers. Andrew McAfee, co-author of the excellent Race Against The Machine followed up with a post of his own. The gist: technology and automation lead to more job creation than job displacement in the past, but that may be changing.
Writing is one of the few areas that McAfee and his co-author Erik… → Read More
Once upon a time, in a land 3,000 miles away, Alexia wrote a post titled Arianna Wants To Put A Nap Room In TechCrunch HQ. Lol. It was in reference to NapQuest, a relatively awesome initiative at Aol/Huffington Post that includes a small room with a massage chair, a shelf full of books, complete with a full-fledged dentist-style reclining chair and a sleep sound machine.
Along with some other… → Read More
During AOL’s Q2 earnings conference call yesterday, CEO Tim Armstrong emphasized several times how the company was moving to a more technology-focused approach in its lines of business. His emphasis was on advertising, but the change in climate is happening in other places, too, it seems: today the company is rolling out an update to AOL Mail, the first overhaul the webmail service has had in five… → Read More
AOL (owner of TechCrunch) continues to stem its declines, although it is still declining. In Q2 results reported just now, the company noted revenues of $531 million. That’s a two percent decline on the same period last year, but it is still the lowest decline it’s had in seven years. Diluted earnings per share were $10.17, while net income was $970.8 million, compared to a net loss of $11.8… → Read More
Buying a car is usually a pretty awful experience. Browsing may be fun, but once it comes time to sign on the dotted line you end up having to do a lot of research, a lot of paperwork, and it’s expensive to boot.
This is what makes services like CarFax so disruptive. And today, a brand new partnership between AOL Autos and CarWoo! should also simplify the process of finding the right car for… → Read More
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