Media giant Time Warner (TWX, news, msgs) plucked a top executive from Google (GOOG, news, msgs) to run its struggling AOL business.
Tim Armstrong, who has been a senior vice president at Google, will replace Randy Falco, who had been AOL’s chairman and CEO for the past two years. Armstrong’s mission: turn the dial-up-and-content company into an online advertising business.
Armstrong was picked because he helped Google become the dominant player in online advertising,
Top Stocks blog: Free long-distance? Oh yeah, Google’s going there
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said in a statement.
Time Warner shares fell 0.1% to $8.31 after hours from a regular close of $8.32. Google was off slightly after hours to $323 after rising to $323.53 during regular trading.
From Gawker:
But what is Armstrong going to do? He’d never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL’s further decline. Let’s assume that’s not in the cards.
The best indicator of Armstrong’s preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google’s top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.
One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong’s college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.
It’s not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who’s itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.
What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL’s slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.
About Tim Armstrong
Tim Armstrong was a member of Google’s Operating Committee and served as the president of the Americas Operations. Under the Americas Operations, Armstrong’s team managed publishers and advertisers’ relationships and platforms with some of the world’s most widely recognized media and agency brands. Armstrong started at Google in the year 2000 and opened the first office outside of the Mountain View, CA headquarters.
Mr. Armstrong joined Google from Snowball.com, where he was vice president of sales and strategic partnerships. Prior to his role at Snowball.com, he served as director of integrated sales & marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, working across the companies’ Internet, TV, radio, and print properties. He started his career by co-founding and running a newspaper based in Boston, MA, before joining IDG to launch their first consumer Internet magazine, I-Way.
Mr. Armstrong sits on the boards of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Advertising Council, and the Advertising Research Foundation, and is a trustee at Connecticut College and Lawrence Academy. He is a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s MediaNYC 2020 committee. He is a graduate of Connecticut College, with a double major in economics and sociology.
Source:MSN,Gawker,Stockhouse
Very interesting infomations!
Thank you very much.
Google seems to be so popular that everyone wants to be like them. After all Google is the number 1 website on the world wide web.