RSSAOL Restructures Again, Moves to NYC
By Ed Oswald | Published September 17, 2007, 12:48 PM
After 22 years in the Dulles/Reston area of Virginia, AOL will move the majority of its operations to New York City to be closer to the hub of worldwide advertising, which makes up a good deal of its new business model.
The company's new headquarters, as well as its advertising and programming operations, will be located at 770 Broadway, where it has leased office space. AOL said today it will continue to maintain a presence in Dulles, Va. and Mountain View, Calif., among other locations.
"New York City is the center of advertising, so it makes perfect sense to locate our corporate headquarters here," chairman and CEO Randy Falco said in a statement. Falco and other senior staff are affected by this move and will relocate. AOL is not sharing exactly how many or who is moving.
Company officials say these steps are necessary in order to better position AOL in the global advertising market. Since transitioning from a subscription-based model to a primarily free ad-supported one last August, the company has struggled a bit.
Ad revenues are up markedly, however subscription numbers are obviously way down, and ad sales are not enough to offset those losses. As of June 30, the company had 10.9 million paying subscribers for Internet access, which was down more than half from its peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.
The company's apparent struggles to attract advertisers in recent months is making matters worse. AOL scaled back expectations for ad sales after the second quarter due to advertisers opting to place their ads on third-party networks rather than AOL directly, which obviously means the company receives a smaller cut then it would otherwise.
Platform A, which combines the networks of all its recent ad acquisitions with the company's own network, is being marketed by the company as central to its return to solid ad growth. Together, the offering is able to reach about 90 percent of US Internet users, it says.
Through this network, advertisers have a one-stop shop to sell their product: through the third-party network of Advertising.com, a mobile network from Third Screen Media, video-ad serving platform Lightningcast, and global ad serving from ADTECH.
"Advertisers are increasingly demanding quality, scale and measurable results, and the new Platform A organization delivers that, Falco said.
In separate news, AOL also announced that it had expanded its relationship with computer manufacturer HP to place AOL's portal and toolbar on computers worldwide. Previously, the agreement only called for such an arrangement among computers sold in the US.
About 30 countries will get the new services in their local languages within two years, according to reports.
The best ISP for its time was Prodigy, even in dos environment the CGA graphics were awesome, I only used AOL 9 years ago for the chat rooms but since I had DSL i never used them, I believe last version I used was AOL 3.0 not sure what they are up to now.
Advertising is great but AOL you have so many other people doing it and for 1/3 the operating cost.
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|AOL Compuserve.. OMG the fact that that is still vernacular is beyond absurd... Those things were for people that had no clue what or how the internet functioned before the internet evolved into the easy to use system it is now... Back when searching the internet involved banging away at archie and veronica for information so you could find links to IPs that had information you wanted...
back then the AOL search functions were the top of the game. a nice all in one place to get what you want. but today? Just why bother? AOL accounts are little more then spam inboxes anymore... hotmail and yahoo are just as bad, true, but AOL is still the worst of it...
Why would anyone want to be a part of a sub community with 1/3 the choice when there is the entire internet that has it all now? Just does not make since... AOL Die already, be gone with you...
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|They are not even a good online web portal. Even copying Yahoo's look and feel.
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|I think it's time someone put the AOL dinosaur out of its misery.
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|Time warner is planning on selling them.
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|everytime i think of aol, i think of dailup, and that is enough to make anyone cringe these days. Like our parents used to say they walked 20 miles in the snow to school, we'll be saying that we used to download at 14.4 kbs and we liked it.
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|oh i downloaded at 2400 baud from BBS :) I miss the ANSI art :)
US Robotics we miss you, its just not the same with 3com
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|This is very interesting. My question is---will such things as software development stay in Dulles and Tucson? This seems to be mostly a top level change. In otherwords, the 'suits' are the ones mostly affected.
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|suites and their staff as well as the AD division. Lots of people will move the space they leased on Brodway can house easily 200+ employees.
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