![]() ![]() It’s growing fast, 21% year on year, but still losing money, $10m last quarter.Įven the legacy dial up business has been chipping in, turning a profit of $182.6m over the most recent quarter, to be precise, but evidently, it’s the programmatic advertising business model that is behind Verizon’s decision to purchase AOL. In fact it’s been the content side of the business, posting operating profit of $13m in Q1 ’15, that has been propping up the overall business whilst Armstrong pulled his video advertising package together and fine-tuned it. AOL had secured close to 1% of the global advertising market for comparison’s sake, Google held 31%. And, hey presto, in February 2013 the company announced its first growth in quarterly revenue for nearly a decade. Next came the launch of the AOL On network, which created a single web site for all of its video content. Then AOL announced a gross rating point guarantee for its online video, making its video ad sales measurable and hence far more attractive to advertisers. The next step was to announce strategic ad selling partnerships with Yahoo and Microsoft, the terms of which enabled the 3 companies to sell inventory on each other’s sites, effectively challenging Google’s pre-eminence in the space. Armstrong had realised before anybody else that programmatic advertising was going to be the next big thing. He now had a revenue generating content business that basically ran itself, allowing him to concentrate his efforts on acquiring more ad-creation and ad-selling companies, such as Adap.TV, bought for $405m in 2013. In 2009 he had authorised the purchase of his own Company, Patch Media, and followed up with the purchases of Silicon Valley news blog Tech Crunch, and The Huffington Post, replacing his content chief at AOL, David Eun, with Ariana Huffington. In April 2010, Armstrong sanctioned the sale of social networking site Bebo, which had been purchased 2 years previously for $850m, for a little over $10m. So what could Armstrong see in AOL’s jumble of underperforming, archaic businesses that nobody else could? In September 2007, at the same time as AOL moved its headquarters from Virginia to New York, the business had started to buy up emerging advertising companies, for example, and repackaged its disparate advertising operations into a new subsidiary which it called Platform A. with Maria Bartiromo wishing her a happy 1 year anniversary at FOX Studios on Februin New York City. NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 24: AOL Chairman & CEO Tim Armstrong on FOX Business Network’s Opening Bell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |