Abu Dhabi: Newly independent Internet company AOL is selectively hiring journalists and engineers after cutting a third of its workforce as it tries to reshape itself as a leading provider of quality web content.
AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner in Dec-ember nine years after one of the most disastrous corporate mergers in history is deep in the middle of a turnaround under its new chief executive, Tim Armstrong.
Its current market value is about $2.7 billion (Dh9.9 billion). When its plan to merge with Time Warner was announced in January 2000, AOL was valued at $163 billion.
Armstrong, a former Google executive, told Reuters yesterday AOL aimed to close the gap between fast-growing methods of distribution on the web including search and social networks, and media content created for a previous era.
Quality
"In reality, the distribution's bigger than the content now. Quality hasn't caught up," he said in an interview at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, adding that there was a huge opportunity to attract advertising to sites publishing quality content.
"I believe there's about a $20 billion gap between where advertising is and where customers are."
AOL, a pioneer of the early internet that is slowly leaving behind its roots in dial-up access, employs about 500 journalists and has another 3,500 working for it freelance or on retainer — of a total of about 5,000 staff after the cuts.
Armstrong said the workforce of the company he inherited was skewed towards technicians as it grappled with dozens of legacy publishing and advertising platforms, and his first priority was to hone and simplify that technology.
In order to focus on that, AOL has cut its presence in some markets outside the United States.
"We pulled back from international to get the plumbing straightened out," he said, adding that AOL would eventually expand abroad again.
