One of AOL's biggest assets is its brand. For people over 30 and, due to AOL Instant Messenger, even a lot of people under 30, AOL was their first real interaction with technology in a positive way.
When I was at AOL, I was always on the web media side while much of the company was focused on the ISP business. We focused on big categories like celebrities and sports, and we created brands around that category like AOL Celebrities, AOL Movies and...
AOL, I think, represented an opportunity for a few things. One is I'm a big believer in the AOL brand, and I think AOL as a brand has touched hundreds of millions of people around the world. Reigniting that brand is a very exciting challenge and a bi...
It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.
A big part of fixing AOL is getting AOL to believe in itself.
I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness.
Until the company believes in itself, AOL didn't have its own space and identity in the marketplace. The opportunity is to get out from under the negative history and figure out the value AOL offers for consumers and for publishers and advertisers.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my ...
If you subscribe to any online service, whether it be AOL, Google, Yahoo, or the Huffington Post, have you noticed that you are forced to watch a seemingly endless ad before the video story appears about a news item that caught your eye? AOL and the ...
I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.
What's happening internally is eventually what will take AOL back to being a growth company.
Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.
I think international is a place that, actually, The Huffington Post and AOL have started to make moves in.
I definitely had an AOL account when I was 14, but I don't remember what my screen name was.
At Time Warner, I had ten percent of the stock after the merger. But when we merged with AOL, I was diluted down to three percent.
I think if the average person that uses AOL can't physically see the changes in the company, we've failed.
Mahalo's business model is advertising. Yahoo, Google, Ask, AOL and MSN are all advertising-based. So I don't see anything wrong with advertising-based search.
The fact of the matter is that the true hits of AOL have always been its easy-to-use services, such as AIM, email, and Buddy Lists.
Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.
Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
