Yahoo and AOL are both former tech/media darlings in the midst of turnaround efforts, but lately they’ve had a striking divergence of fortune.
Wall Street cheered AOL’s deal to sell $1 billion worth of patents to Microsoft, sending the onetime Internet pioneer’s stock soaring over 40% Monday to levels not seen in nearly two years.
AOL’s network of hyperlocal blogs, Patch, may have become more than a little controversial for its use of unpaid writers and rumors it’s lost ridiculous piles of money, but it’s possible that the audience doesn’t care — new figures show that the network more than tripled its traffic in 2011.
AOL has launched a preview of an all-new AIM, and it has very little to do with the creaky old one except that it works on the same IM network.
Those AOL-Yahoo deal rumors you’ve probably forgotten about? They’re apparently still a possibility, with anonymous sources saying that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been meeting with shareholders over the past couple of weeks to try and sell the idea of a buyout of the onetime online giant.
When is child labor not child labor? The answer, according to AOL-owned blog The Huffington Post, may be “When teenagers are producing content for the Internet for free.”
Bloomberg is reporting that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is in preliminary talks with Yahoo officials “to gauge its interest in combining the companies,” according to two anonymous sources.
AOL took the curtains off their newest project, a customizable iPad-only magazine dubbed Editions, yesterday. The free download allows users to cultivate content across several news fields and arranges stories into an attractive magazine format, complete with photos.
Following the controversial layoffs and addition of thousands of unpaid bloggers that came with the formation of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, it looks like it’s time for AOL to start rebuilding its content team more traditionally. Former CBSNews.com and Salon.com staffers are being brought into AOL – in paid positions, of course – [...]
AOL’s plan to add 8,000 bloggers for its hyperlocal Patch.com service may be slightly controversial due to its unpaid nature but, as this open letter to Patch from the Pacific Media Workers Guild and Newspaper Guild-CWA “Guild Freelancers” blog demonstrates, the call for bloggers didn’t help matters:
Yes, it was just a few weeks back that AOL was laying off writers and publicly grappling with class action lawsuits filed against it for exploitation of unpaid bloggers, but such concerns are apparently a thing of the past. Now, it’s all about growth – and trying to recruit as many as 8,000 new bloggers over [...]
