paidContent news watch | AOL

Where Does Arianna Fit Into AOL's New Patch Plans?

2012-02-09T14:51:12Z

AOL (NYSE: AOL) has hired a new Chief Content Officer in its latest attempt to reboot Patch, the network of hundreds of sites that offer “hyper local” coverage.

The appointment of Parenting.com’s Rachel Fishman Feddersen comes at a high time when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is promising impatient shareholders that Patch is “not a pet project” and that he will turn around the sites that reportedly lost $100 million last year.

While a turnaround strategy is clearly in order, there’s a big wild card here. Namely, what role will Arianna Huffington now play in the Patch properties?

Recall that Huffington talked up Patch when AOL bought her site last spring and that she later told Vogue that “going local” was one of two things that made up her “Zeitgeist” (who says things like that?).

Huffington has also taken a hands-on role by promoting a “Local Voices” opinion feature and by launching 33 new Patch sites in states at the center of the Republican primaries.

The appointment of Fishman Feddersen suggests, however, that Huffington wants to distance herself from Patch. In response to an email query, a Huffington Post spokesman simply referred me to a Reuters (NYSE: TRI) story which said Fishman Feddersen will report to Jon Brod, President of AOL Local, Mapping and Ventures and a founder of Patch.

In the meantime, Huffington appears to have turned her attention to other projects like a video-streaming service and international editions of the site in France, Italy and Quebec.

As for Patch, which lost two senior sales people last year, AOL’s Armstrong said that 2011 was the high watermark for investment and that this year will see “meaningful improvements on the economics.” Industry veteran Jim Romenesko reported yesterday that the turnaround plans includes consolidation, slashing freelance budgets and an editorial emphasis on “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy.”

Patch’s original mission—to provide news coverage for underserved areas—has long seemed more like a journalism school dream (albeit a commendable one) than a business plan. Armstrong claimed these local markets were the last “white spaces” on the internet but the ad dollars simply have not appeared.

The new appointment looks like Patch’s last kick at the “hyper-local” can before the sites become “hyper-regional” or simply vanish altogether.

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AOL Q4: Ads Up By 10%; Beats Street Estimates But Still Slumping

2012-02-01T11:57:54Z

AOL (NYSE: AOL) today reported that its strategy to turn around its advertising business is definitely paying off, with sale up by 10 percent on the year before. But while its figures beat Wall Street estimates that wasn’t enough to make up for declines in subscriptions and other areas, resulting in a net decline in revenues for Q4.

The growth of 10 percent is the third consecutive quarter of ads growth for the company, but AOL still has a ways to go before it can keep pace with wider online ad growth: according to figures from eMarketer, the overall U.S. ad market grew by 23.5 percent in the same quarter that AOL grew only 10 percent. Ditto for annual figures, where AOL grew ads for the year by two percent while the wider market grew by 23.5 percent to $32 billion.

eMarketer also points out that AOL’s current share of the U.S. display market is only at 4.2 percent, a decline from 4.8 percent in 2010 and 10.6 percent in 2007. Compare that to Facebook which had a share of 16.3 percent in 2011 (figures from comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) yesterday put that share at an even higher number, just under 28 percent).

Still AOL managed to exceed average Wall Street estimates as polled by Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Finance: their figure was $0.16 per share, while in actuality it was $0.23, at the high end of analyst estimates.

Some of the figures from AOL’s Q4 earnings sheet:

—AOL’s Q4 revenues are still in decline but as AOL points out the decline is the lowest it’s been in five years. AOL reported revenues of $576.8 million for the quarter, down three percent on a year ago. FY 2011 revenues were at $2.2 billion, down nine percent on 2010.

—Quarterly net income saw a big decline over the last year: $22.8 million, down by 66 percent over the same quarter a year ago. However, for the full year, AOL has managed to post a big reversal on its performance a year ago, when it reported a net loss of $782.5 million; for FY 2011 it posted net income of $13.1 million.

—Global display revenues were up by 15 percent to $170.6 million, and third-party network revenues were up by 20 percent to $104.8 million: we’ve seen some interesting deals with AOL in the latter category, for example its agreement to sell ads for Bonnier’s Parenting.com.

—Search and contextual ads remain the smallest parts of the overall ad business and saw further declines this time around, too: they were $88.4 million for the quarter, a decline of eight percent.

—Subscription revenue was down by 18 percent to $194.6 million; despite the declines, still more revenues than AOL is getting from its display ad business.

AOL says that video continues to remain a growing business, as does its Project Devil branded advertising push and its local Patch service, which doubled its revenues, although AOL didn’t break them out separately.

Traffic for AOL’s content sites, under the Huffington Post Media Group, were able to offset declines at MapQuest and AIM, but that meant that overall traffic was flat.

Here’s a look at our own compilation of data to chart how AOL has progressed under CEO Tim Armstrong:

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We will be speaking with CEO Tim Armstrong later today, which will hopefully provide some more color to these figures.

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Yahoo: Revenues Slightly Down, Investors Await Words Of Wisdom From New CEO

2012-01-24T21:20:24Z

In its first earnings announcement since recently appointing Scott Thompson as its new CEO and the seeing off founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) today reported Q4 revenues of $1.169 billion, down three percent on the same quarter last year.

Those revenues were slightly lower than the $1.19 billion expected by analysts polled by none other than Yahoo Finance.

Earnings per share stood at 24 cents—exactly the same as Q4 2010, and in line with analysts’ expectations. That probably comes as some relief to investors, considering all the turmoil the company has seen in the past year: changes have included a new CEO, numerous executive departures, an overhaul of its advertising system to partner up with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and AOL (NYSE: AOL), and continuing loss of market share in both display and search to other competitors like Google.

The numbers and business situation of Yahoo couldn’t be more different from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), which also reported earnings moments ago with sales of $46 billion for the quarter.

Some of the particulars from the Yahoo’s results release:

—Display revenue was $612 million, a four percent decrease compared to $635 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full-year they were actually slightly up: $2.16 billion compared to $2.15 billion in 2010.
—Search revenue was $465 million, down a massive 27 percent compared to $640 million for the fourth quarter of 2010.
—North America revenue was $885 million, down from $991 million for the quarter last year.

Yahoo will be hosting an investor call to go through the earnings, and for its new CEO, Scott Thompson, to give a few more particulars about the state of the company. A call with investors and media three weeks ago when his appointment was announced were very light on specifics. We’ll update this post as that proceeds.

Update: The call is kicking off with a few words from Thompson. “I’ve validated what I believed coming in, the talent of the people and the huge opportunity ahead of us,” said Thompson. “I believe we have a lot of work to do and it’s still early.” He says that at the moment Yahoo has 702 million unique visitors worldwide. He says he will lay out the foundations for what he plans for 2012.

He says in the future he will provide more insight about the details of results covering regional differences.

“There is no question we need to do better and we will,” he says. “We need to better monetize the engagement that we have.”

Display was mainly affected by declines in the Americas—it actually grew in Asia Pacific and Europe, while declining in the U.S.

The sales force is getting overhauled, according to CFO Tim Morse. “Several major advertisers that reduced spend in 2011…have made meaningful commitments or 2012.”

Unique visitors are up by 11 percent around Yahoo’s “tent pole” events such as the Super Bowl, the Royal Wedding and others. Yahoo is putting more, Morse says, into its “editorial voice,” with the creation of original content. One recent notable announcement there is the project with Tom Hanks; another is the creation of Livestand.

Some frank and slightly depressing words that really size up not just the challenge ahead but perhaps hint at employee morale? “Despite these changes, revenue isn’t growing,” said Morse. “We expected better.”

Back to Thompson who gives a very robust pep talk for the future, which sounded very encouraging except that it’s Yahoo we’re talking about, which has been the subject of many robust speeches over the years. Some highlights:

“Our users need to use our services more frequently…We need to be a media company as well as a tech company.”

“I make decisions quickly and move fast, fast, fast. That’s how we get to playing offense rather than defense.”

“We will focus on balancing our investment resources and allocation of capital on products of today, tomorrow and long term…To strike the right balance, we need to focus on the products that are driving results today. But also the business of tomorrow. But also a small but meaningful percentage on products that will play out 12 months from now.”

“At least two fundamental building blocks customer experience and data…We want our users to spend more time with yahoo because they love what we are doing.”

“Data is the most underrated asset at Yahoo.”

“I believe our company can do much more to innovate and disrupt.”

Some questions from the analysts:

Future acquisitions?
These will be made to fill technology gaps, said Thompson.

What’s your strategy to turn around display?
Alas, no specifics but this: “We’re meeting with customers to understand why they don’t give us more of their spend. We’re after this with a real sense of urgency. Too early to say what actions we might take but full intention is to get that back and growing at a healthy rate.

Are there no sacred cows going forward? And what about premium video, any new deals?
Thompson: “I could interpret the first question in a variety of ways, as part of the work we’re doing we are understanding and evaluating all options going forward. Things we will continue, stop, and additional monetization strategies. We are being aggressive.”

Morse: “As for short-form, we had 9 of the top 10 original shows for web programing. We need to do more there (no numbers disclosed on traffic).”

What products do you think are appropriate areas for Yahoo to move into? And what about the declines in search?
Thompson: “Too early for strategic framework but we are looking at how to increase monetization.” Morse: “On search, in mobile it’s still too early on for how you monetize going forward. There is a lot yet left to evolve in mobile. I’m not concerned, I’m optimistic.” Thompson: “No winner has shown himself visible in mobile search.” (Google (NSDQ: GOOG) might beg to differ here.)

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David Kenny Replacing Mike Kelly As CEO Of The Weather Channel Companies

2012-01-24T13:45:35Z

In a surprise move, The Weather Channel Companies is swapping out CEOs. David Kenny is replacing Mike Kelly as CEO effective immediately; the Akamai-Digitas vet also will be chairman of the company owned by a consortium of Bain Capital, The Blackstone Group, and NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Universal.

It appears so far that this is less about any issues with Kelly’s performance and more about getting Kenny. Kelly will become an advisor to TWCC and to Bain, and Kenny begins in his new role effectively immediately.

Kelly had been CEO of TWCC since July 2009 and other past roles have included head of media at AOL (NYSE: AOL). Kenny, meanwhile, brings with him some skills that could help TWCC’s growth in the years ahead. He comes from streaming and content delivery giant Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM), where he had been president. Prior to that, Kenny racked up of years of experience in digital marketing and interactive advertising: he co-founded VivaKi, the digital and television arm of Publicis Groupe, and he was chairman and CEO Digitas Inc. He also sits on the board of Yahoo.

In an interview with paidContent a few moments ago, Kenny said that the offer of a CEO job had come out of initial conversations for him to join the board of The Weather Channel. “We’d been talking about how to move faster on programming and other areas,” and that gradually progressed to the subject of Kenny taking on a bigger role.

He told paidContent that the three key areas he hopes to focus on as CEO are to invest more in programming, digital assets and international expansion. In programming, the emphasis will be on making more long-form content, while the mobile apps and the website will focus on more basic weather information. Both of these are largely ad-supported at the moment, and Kenny said this is how they will remain.

As for international, this is where you can see the Akamai content delivery expertise coming into view: “TWCC has been more focused on the U.S. up to now, but there is an opportunity globally and I believe you will see a much more global enterprise going forward,” he said.

In a departing internal memo to staff, which paidContent has obtained and is copying below, Kelly gave Kenny a full endorsement in the role: “TWCC will be in good hands with David Kenny at the helm,” he wrote. He noted also that the pair have been good friends for many years.

Under Kelly, TWCC has seen some huge growth in its digital media business—specifically around its many apps for mobile devices.

Being about weather—a subject that is continually changing—these apps have picked up a particularly loyal following.

At paidContent’s mobile conference last year, Kelly noted that mobile users use The Weather Channel’s apps 26 days a month, with 30 million of the company’s apps getting downloaded in 2010. Overall reach for the company, as reported last year, was 35 million people, covering access from TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. During one period last year the company launched 10 separate apps in 11 weeks.

Kelly’s memo:

As you know, this morning we announced a change in leadership for TWCC. As we make this transition, let me take a moment to thank you for making the last two and a half years such a pleasant and rewarding experience.

I came to The Weather Channel with many goals, including building a strong team, developing long term plans and moving the business forward. A part of these efforts included our “one company” initiatives, which I believe have been a tremendous success. I’m proud of these accomplishments and even more proud of the teamwork it took to get it all done. I will continue to be involved in the company, serving as a special adviser to David and the Board of Directors and I will also serve as an adviser to Bain Capital.

TWCC will be in good hands with David Kenny at the helm. We’ve been friends for many years and I am certain he is the leader who will keep things moving forward and secure a great future for the company.

Thank you again for your hard work and dedication. We’ve come a long way together and we’ve seen the power of one company and the power of vision and values. In the past years, we’ve seen record viewership and page views and saw our mobile business reach unimaginable heights. The resulting economic growth has put us in a strong position. Thanks for the great teamwork. Keep growing.

Sincerely,
Mike Kelly

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Updated: Bonjour! AOL Takes French Le Huffington Post Live

2012-01-23T10:03:37Z

Huffington Post today took one more step in its ongoing march for a wider international reach: it has now officially opened Le Huffington Post for business. This is not the first non-U.S. edition of the news site, but it is the first to produce the content in partnership with an established media organization—in this case, two: the Le Monde Group and Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendante.

It’s worth watching how Le Huffington Post develops, since AOL (NYSE: AOL) and the Huffington Post Media Group are following the partnership pattern with other non-English launches later this year.

The blog will team up with El Pais in Spain for a Spanish edition, which is coming online in March. And—as we first reported last week—it will also launch an Italian site with L’Espresso.

It’s not known how AOL structures its business relationships with HuffPo partners, but paidContent understands that the French groups all share equal equity in the Le Huffington Post. None of the parties have confirmed this, however.

The original, HuffingtonPost.com, has become one of the most popular news sites in the U.S., and one of the most-visited of all sites. Figures from June 2011 showed that it had actually surpassed the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as the most popular news site in the country. We have contacted comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) for more recent figures and will update this post when we get them.

Update: comScore tells us that in fact in the month of December, HuffingtonPost.com was visited more than any newspaper site in the U.S., with six million more unique visitors than the next-biggest brand, the New York Times—although if you added in other properties like NYT’s About.com, the New York Times’ group would have about 76.5 million uniques. Meanwhile, in the UK, HuffPo.co.uk is at number-11 at the moment. The full tables ranking popular sites in the U.S. and UK are at the end of this post. [original post continues below]

Before today, HuffPo had launched two other international editions—both in English—HuffingtonPost.ca in Canada, and HuffingtonPost.co.uk in the UK.

Both of these were launched on HuffPo’s own steam, without a helping hand from a local partner. That may have been easier to do: given the common English language across the three territories, it’s likely that Canada and the UK were already bringing in some traffic to the U.S. site, and so were natural first-efforts in an international strategy.

Some have wondered if HuffPo could succeed in the UK, however, because the many established UK national dailies already have a strong culture of opinion-led journalism—the kind that has become a popular mainstay of blogging and forms a cornerstone of HuffPo’s success in the U.S. (one other being a lot of aggregation, a one-stop shop for news; another being a sheer proliferation of content, much of it written for free).

It’s perhaps unfair to compare HuffingtonPost.co.uk against other news sites, only six months into its existence. Worth pointing out that AOL, citing figures from comScore, says that traffic on the UK site has been growing steadily since launching in the summer of 2011:

“HuffPost UK currently has 4.1 million ~~3.5 million~~ unique visitors,” a spokesperson told paidContent in an email, “and has grown nearly 50 percent since it launched six months ago. The site has a large, vibrant group blog, with an expanding roster of 2,500 people who have used its blogging platform, including Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Noel Gallagher, Liz Hurley, Joanna Lumley and Ricky Gervais. Engagement is also strong and growing, with users posting a record 7,000 comments on a single day last week.”

Update 2: That 4.1 million figure is higher than comScore’s numbers detailed below because it includes incoming traffic from outside the UK, while comScore’s numbers measure only UK-based traffic. [original post follows below]

HuffPo first announced its partnership with Le Monde and LNEI in October 2010—meaning that it is moving quick on getting these products to market once making them public. This is only one part of the company’s Francophonic strategy, though: the Canadian HuffPo is apparently also launching a Quebec edition of HuffingtonPost.ca this month, too.

Source: comScore

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ITN Unifying Ad Sales For Multi-Platform Video Syndication

2012-01-19T10:15:26Z

UK TV video news producer ITN is unifying its online ad sales platform as it expands into a burgeoning number of online destinations.

The company’s core work is producing TV bulletins for ITV (LSE: ITV), Channel 4, Channel 5 and video footage for others like CNN, NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) and PBS. But it has been launching its own branded web video channels as well as producing online video series for web-native clients, much of it through YouTube.

That diversification has meant ITN’s ad sales operation has been fragmented across each new syndication platform. So it is now taking on Rightser to manage its content and sell its ads across the whole of the footprint.

The news underscores a trend for more scale in online ad sales around video, and is also perhaps a sign that ITN’s online audience has grown big enough to merit the investment.

The new digital strategy, ~~called One ITN~~, will see Rightster become the new platform provider for ITN Productions to serve all of its online content across different portals such as Facebook and at least two YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) channels (ITN News and The 411 entertainment news channel) and its own portal, ITN.co.uk.

These are channels where ITN already gets good traffic: it says that it currently ranks as the biggest news provider in the UK on YouTube in terms of views.

Financial terms of the deal have not been released. But key to the deal is the hope that this will bring in more ad revenue for ITN, which does not have any paywalls around any of its online content at the moment.

A lack of scale in many long-tail content plays is one reason why digital advertising has continued to play second-fiddle to other advertising mediums like TV, which, for all its faults, at least has large, concurrent audience numbers that media buyers for large brands need when justifying ad investments.

We have also seen other industries, like publishing, make moves to tackle this as well: earlier this month, AOL (NYSE: AOL) announced that it would be selling ad inventory for Bonniers’ Parenting.com by putting it together with its own parenting content channels—a move that Bonnier hopes will get more big-name advertisers buying into ad space on its site.

The deal being announced today is an extension of an existing relationship between Rightster and ITN. The two were already partnering together for specific live event coverage that the broadcaster expected would get spikes of traffic: the two worked together to livestream the Royal Wedding to 20 countries via Facebook; Rightster is also providing the backbone for ITN’s streaming of the Leveson inquiry in the UK into media practices and ethics in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

Another aspect of the deal is that Rightster runs what it calls a “multi-cloud” system, meaning that if content delivery fails at any one point, the system will switch to taking it from another to keep the streams flowing.

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HuffPo Partners With L'Espresso For 'L'Huffington Post Italy'

2012-01-19T06:59:43Z

The Huffington Post Media Group (NYSE: AOL) is partnering with Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso for the launch this year of an Italian edition, paidContent has learned. The partnership, to be announced today, follows a pattern already in place for the French edition debuting Monday and for the Spanish edition due to launch in March: team up with at least one major national media partner and tap into its existing network to create a new entity using the HuffPo model with localized branding.

The partners for Le Huffington Post France are The Le Monde Group and Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendante. For El Huffington Post Spain, it’s El Pais.

In Italy, Indépendante Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso publishes national daily newspaper La Repubblica and newsmag L’Espresso, 18 regional dailies plus is in radio and TV. The national daily’s Repubblica.it is the most-visited Italian news site.

Arianna Huffington’s ambitions for an international brand predate HuffPO’s acquisition by AOL last year. While AOL has trimmed back considerably internationally, the merger with a larger global company gave Huffington Post a foundation for that expansion and the ability to achieve scale. Huffington Post UK and Huffington Post Canada launched last year as solo efforts with an emphasis on being purely digital.

The local media partnerships offer a different kind of expansion help. Instead of being the outsider jumping in to fill a gap or do X, Y or Z better than anyone already on the scene, HuffPo is the outsider working with entrenched insiders to blend aggregation, original reporting and local blogging in a true national edition.

Update: The plans for the Italian-language edition were announced this morning.

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Paul Berry, CTO: I Left HuffPost For The Startup Bug-Or In This Case, Mouse

2012-01-10T22:54:30Z

Today it was revealed that Paul Berry, the longtime-CTO of AOL’s Huffington Post, will be leaving his role at the news site, along with the unrelated departure of the site’s managing editor, Nico Pitney. We spoke to Paul earlier about the social-media focused startup that he plans to launch next, and what he will be leaving behind.

The new startup—a “social platform” called Rebel Mouse—is currently still under wraps, although Berry tells us that more details will be emerging in the next few weeks.

What we do know already is that it will be based in New York and have quite a few other things in common with the Huffington Post: it will be focused around social media have a big emphasis on viral growth using “methodologies” he honed at HuffPost (more on that below); it will be mainly consumer-facing; and it will be built out by several former key executives from Huffington Post: in addition to Berry, he says he is also working with former CEO Eric Hippeau, former chief revenue officer Greg Coleman, and co-founders Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Perretti—all of whom left the company before Berry.

Despite these similarities and connections, Berry insists it will be quite a different product from the online news goliath that he helped create. “The intention is not to compete with HuffPost or big media companies,” was his flat answer to that question. “We intend to have a huge audience and a lot of users but not in a way that competes with HuffPost.”

The company has been funded with some money from Berry and some from Ken Lerer’s Lerer Ventures.

Berry describes his time with HuffPost as being with the company since “day two” of its life, and when you speak to him about the growth of the company, and how it mastered viral techniques to drive that growth, you really get the sense that HuffPost has been as much a technical phenomenon as it has been a news/media one.

The numbers speak to that, too. When Berry first started, the company had three million uniques per month. At the time of the AOL (NYSE: AOL) acquisition, it had 55 million uniques. As of today, the site has 120 million uniques per month and 1.7 billion page views—numbers that continue to grow, not least because the site is building out internationally.

“What I developed at HuffPost was a lean development methodology,” says Berry, who relies in part on a network of developers in Eastern Europe for some of the work. “I had done it before but had a chance to prove it on a wider scale. The basis of what we did at HuffPost was to learn how things go viral and how to make them go even more viral.

“A huge part of HuffPost was how we made the product and technology together, and how we innovated with Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Twitter to do that.” He says these methodologies, style, and (significantly) contacts to those huge traffic funnels, will all be a part of Rebel Mouse, too.

Berry will be leaving AOL on February 15, and he says his departure is not connected to any earnout connected to the acquisition of HuffPost by AOL, which it bought a year ago, in February 2011, for $315 million. The news of Berry’s and Pitney’s departures was first reported earlier today by Forbes.

“The acquisition was very good for me,” he admits, “but it was more about taking the time to do this professionally. It’s possibly a misplaced paternal sense, but it matters to me leave HuffPost in a good place and I’ve taken the time to do that well.” He notes that he’s hired people from top media properties like the BBC and New York Times (NYSE: NYT) to oversee areas like design, user interface and technical development, and all those people have stayed on “and are staying on.”

“I’m not leaving because I don’t believe in the mission anymore,” he says. “I’m leaving for the thrill of building something from nothing. It’s the startup bug.”

The other project that Berry will be devoting some time to will be in the running of a technology start-up incubator. This, too, will be drawing on HuffingtonPost experience. He says this will focus on a smaller number of companies—“this isn’t 500 startups or anything”—and it will apply “social approaches that we’ve learned to different vericals and areas.”

It sounds a little vague at the moment but the idea is to “help develop prototypes, demos and then help those startups seek funding as they gain traction.” This will be based in the original HuffingtonPost HQ.

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All In The Family: AOL, Bonnier's Parenting Group Form Ad, Content Alliance

2012-01-06T01:27:13Z

AOL (NYSE: AOL) may have recently had a high-profile rap on the knuckles from a shareholder not pleased with the company’s direction, but it has continued to forge ahead with its strategy to find innovative ways of growing the reach of its advertising network and traffic on its own content sites. The latest: a deal with the publisher Bonnier’s Parenting Group to sell ad inventory and promote content from Parenting.com, in a bid to bring more moms to the AOL table.

Under the agreement, AOL will get a chance to sell premium ad space for the Group’s flagship website, Parenting.com, while Parenting.com will be able to tap into some of AOL’s more advanced assets around ad tech and marketing services. It is expected to go into effect at the beginning of Q1 2012.

The deal will give the Parenting Group potentially access to a new class of advertisers as a result, since AOL will be able to add Parenting.com’s inventory to its own for more comprehensive media buys from advertisers seeking to target parents—and specifically surfing moms. The release did not specify how much of Parenting.com’s inventory will go into the AOL mix, and what the financial terms of the alliance would be.

According to AdAge, this deal appears to be different (and likely more lucrative) than the pre-existing partnerships that AOL has to sell ad inventory for publishers: those deals covered only inventory unsold by the publishers themselves, similar to the ad alliance that AOL recently formed with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), around unsold ad inventory.

The content part of the alliance, meanwhile, will see AOL “integrate” content from Parenting.com into different AOL properties including Huffington Post Parents, the AOL Family channel and AOL.com itself. Cross-posting third party content is something Parenting.com already does on its own site, running a feed of family-related stories from NBC’s Today.com.

The idea in the AOL deal is to bring more mother/parent content, and therefore traffic, to AOL’s properties. But AOL says that it will also provide links to the content back to Parenting.com, so in theory Bonnier’s site should see a traffic bump as a result as well. AOL says the content part of the deal alone will cover 12.5 million users if you add together Parenting.com, AOL Family and HuffPost Parents.

As with all alliances, particularly those between companies that might have in the past been competitors, the devil will be in the details. Which company will take the lead in a particular sale, and will there be a get-out clause if the ad partnership doesn’t produce the desired effect?

Still, given that AOL has a lot more work to do to beef up its content business to keep disgruntled investors happy; and that Parenting.com risks falling behind competitors if it doesn’t add more scale, there may be more to gain here than lose.

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Report: Yahoo To Name PayPal Head As CEO. Sign Of A More Commercial Push?

2012-01-04T11:49:43Z

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) faced a pretty big whack of upheavals in 2011—not least of which was the none-too-quiet departure of their outspoken former CEO Carol Bartz. Will the company this year try to stabilize and play things a bit more quietly? Just days into 2012, a report has emerged that it could be naming a new CEO—Scott Thompson, the current president of eBay’s PayPal—with the announcement coming possibly as soon as today.

The news was first put out into the ether by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who got the original tip from an anonymous source, which means that the information has not been confirmed by either eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) or Yahoo, but Swisher has been on top of (and accurate about) much of the executive-upheaval news at the internet portal.

Swisher describes Thompson as a bona-fide “Internet geek,” but he is actually something a little more specific: his background is in commerce and payments (prior to PayPal he worked for Visa). And most recently, his big emphasis has been in mobile commerce, an area where PayPal has grown and is growing its presence a lot.

That raises tantalizing questions about what could be Yahoo’s next strategic step. More effective ways of monetizing the traffic that passes through its advertising, search and portal networks? Possibly even looking at a new direction in transactions? That’s an area where companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) have established a strong base, largely through their mobile businesses.

Of course, a cynic might argue that a leopard cannot change its spots, and that Yahoo’s organizational issues may prove to challenge any new ideas. Once a leader in search, advertising and online information portals, Yahoo has in more recent years seen those businesses hit hard, particularly by competition from Google and increasingly Facebook (both now make more than Yahoo from display ads, an area where it was once king).

That has led to the company to try many different things over the past several years to turns things around—some meanderings in mobile, many executive changes, new products and services, and more recently an ad partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and AOL (NYSE: AOL), two former arch competitors also hit by the Facebook/Google-naut. It actually beat analyst forecasts during its last quarterly earnings—but that seemed to be more due to lowered expectations.

After Bartz left the company in September 2011, Yahoo began to explore various options for itself, including the possible sale of part or all of the company. That has involved protracted negotiations with private equity firms, and also Softbank and Alibaba, who are shareholders and have respective JVs with Yahoo in Japan and China. These are still ongoing and could either result in the sale of those JVs, or, if you believe some reports, the outright sale of Yahoo to Alibaba.

The appointment of a CEO like Thompson, who could offer a new direction for Yahoo, could prove to be useful regardless of what the outcome is of those other negotiations.

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What's Coming In 2012: Digital Advertising, Up Close And Personal

2011-12-30T12:00:08Z

This is the fifth in a series of posts this week that will highlight key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012 in the sectors we cover most, from publishing to legal, and from mobile to advertising.

According to figures from ZenithOptimedia, global advertising revenues will reach $486 billion in 2012, a rise of 4.7 percent compared to 2011. With wider economic pressures bearing down on the overall ad market, digital ad spend is still seeing healthy growth: it will account for slightly more than one-fifth of all ad spend, but more than half of all growth, as advertisers become more confident in digital media metrics, and the ad industry gets more sophisticated in what it offers to brands and publishers in the name of digital advertising—which will remain a key way of funding digital content, as media companies continue to tinker with other charging models. Here are some specific areas to watch in this space:

Social media and advertising. Social networks already make money from marketing and advertising services—according to an estimate from eMarketer in September, Facebook apparently will have made some $3.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2011—so 2012 will be the year that we see more social networks, not just Facebook, look at leveraging their audiences to grow this even more.

These advertising services will be a crucial piece to put into place for Facebook in particular as it gears up for a widely-expected IPO. Keeping in mind recent IPOs for Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) and Zynga, in which people questioned the longer-term business models for these social media properties, Facebook will be looking for big and consistent sources of revenue to demonstrate to the investor community that it has a solid foundation for the long haul.

As my colleague Jeff pointed out, they may also be the source of more debates about online privacy. Facebook has already started laying the groundwork for how it might draw on the content and nature of a users’ activity on the site as a route to promoting products and services to others within users’ timelines. Similarly, Twitter is moving to new ways to advertise brands to users, for example, with promoted tweets populating people’s timelines. There are very likely more innovations along these lines in the pipeline.

New ad formats on social networking sites may, to some, feel like a violation of an individual’s space, and we may see more challenges and questions coming from regulators and users as a result. On the other hand, some argue that if these services free to use, this is the price to pay. What might equally be interesting is to see whether ad-driven sites like these at any point consider paid, ad-free versions of their services.

Ads get a bit more personal. I don’t think that it will be only social networking sites that make use of our personal information in new ways in advertising. Companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are also looking at ways of leveraging its databases to make its advertising units more valuable. One example is a new search ad format that automatically inserts your gmail address to sign you up for marketing lists if you click on a link in the ad. The other area that is worth watching here is mobile advertising, where an advertiser uses potentially a combination of an opted-in user’s location, browsing activity and purchasing habits to deliver relevant ads and offers to consumers.

Consolidation: small, medium and large? Last year saw some significant acquisitions that pointed to ongoing consolidation as digital advertising continues to mature: Google’s $400-million AdMeld purchase (which officially closed earlier this month); ValueClick’s $75-million acquisition of mobile ad firm Greystripe; and Adobe’s purchase of Efficient Frontier, all of which further pad out the bigger companies’ ad services business.

There will very likely be at least a few more deals like these, but the question is whether consolidation could also extend to bigger players like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and AOL (NYSE: AOL). They are still some of the strongest companies in online advertising (with 13.1 percent and 4.2 percent of the overall display market, according to eMarketer) but they are being hit hard by companies like Google and Facebook, once known respectively for search and social ads but already now bigger than AOL and Yahoo in display revenues.

If you believe the reports, Yahoo is already in play: Alibaba, the China-based internet giant that is a parter of Yahoo’s in that country, currently wants to buy Yahoo out of China, but Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, apparently also has an option to buy Yahoo outright, too. He has already enlisted the help of lobbyists in Washington, which could prove useful if Ma decides to bite.

As for AOL, it recently had to weather an embarrassing leaked letter from one of its biggest investors, Starboard Value, ripping apart the company’s business strategy and accusing it of focussing too much on “money-losing” areas like its content business. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong’s response has been: be patient. But if things don’t start looking brighter for AOL in 2012, investors like Starboard could take things up another notch and call for something a little stronger.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.

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Highlights Of 2011: The Year In Advertising, By The Numbers

2011-12-22T11:00:11Z

This is the fourth in a series of posts over this week that looks at the most significant developments of this year in the sectors that we cover, from publishing to mobile to advertising.

Despite the economic slowdown, digital advertising and marketing revenues grew in 2011 and remained a cornerstone of many digital content strategies. Here are five numbers charting their progress this past year.

$1 billion: 2011 was the first year that revenues from mobile advertising in the U.S. passed the $1 billion mark, according to researchers at eMarketer. Growth is coming from increased confidence in the medium, but also because advertisers are getting better scale for their investment: some 38 percent of U.S. consumers use a smartphone and access the mobile internet at least one time each month. The $1 billion figure includes display, search and messaging-based advertising, with search ads making up the biggest portion, at $349 million. But while $1 billion is a milestone of sorts, that number is still small when you compare it to the bigger advertising pie…

$464 billion: This is the total number of ad dollars spent in 2011, according to Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia. That’s a 3.5 percent rise compared to ad spend in 2010, and shows that ads are remaining somewhat resilient despite the economic slowdown in the U.S. and Europe and worries about the larger debt crisis. Online ad growth is actually outpacing that: it rose 12 percent in 2011, and made up 15.9 percent, or $73.8 billion, of overall ad spend. As with mobile ads, search ads made up the biggest share of online ads (25.6 percent), with display (22.6 percent) and classified (4.7 percent) following.

3: The number of internet portals needed to work together to match the weight and heft of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or Facebook when it comes to competing in display advertising. In September, AOL (NYSE: AOL), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) officially joined forces in an ad sales alliance: each will continue to pursue their own ad businesses, but also sell each other’s unsold inventory. Although they didn’t say it, the move looked defensive: all three make significant ad revenue from display ads, an area where both Facebook and Google are increasingly moving, beyond their respective bases of social and search advertising. The display market was worth $12.33 billion in the U.S., says eMarketer. But display ads cannot save everything…

4.5 percent: The percentage of AOL owned by Starboard Value, which this week sent a damning letter to AOL’s CEO, Tim Armstrong, outlining what it believes have been strategic mistakes made by Armstrong and AOL’s board. Among the problems, Starboard believes AOL has put too much money into trying to save its display business: the advertising that AOL sells against its own properties (which include TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Engadget and many others) is not covering the cost of running them. It calculates that AOL could be losing more than $500 million per year on this business. Other unprofitable areas that it names in its letter include the local-content business Patch, which also hinges on an advertising-based business model. AOL’s response? We’re still in turnaround mode.

$700 million: The amount of money raised by Groupon when it made its initial public offering in November. The daily deal— in which direct marketing meets online retail—has proven to be one of the more popular formats for promoting businesses and brands this year, spawning a million Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) competitors and outright clones, even as Groupon’s own stock seems to have hit a few rocks.

Read the rest of the posts in our Highlights of 2011 archives.

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AOL Ponies Up For Appssavvy's $7.1 Million Round As Social Ads Make Friends

2011-12-20T16:20:21Z

One of the consequences of the growth of social media has been the rise of that category of digital, interactive advertising referred to as social ads. Today, one of the companies working in this area, appssavvy, has announced that it has picked up $7.1 million in funding, with AOL’s AOL (NYSE: AOL) Ventures as one of its new investors. There seems to be mini-rush of funding for social advertising companies: the follows another social ad network, MediaBrix, picking up $4 million last week.

Social ads are are still an emerging area in digital advertising compared to basic display, search and even video advertising. While these are typically used in conjunction with social media sites—for example, alongside social games or within Facebook pages—there is of course an opportunity to extend these to other kinds of online properties.

However, it will be worth watching how social ads develop, and how sophisticated they become in light of the often-tricky area of online privacy: just last week, a judge in California ruled that Facebook users can potentially sue the social network for exploiting their “likes” in advertising on the site.

In addition to first-time investor AOL Ventures, Appssavvy‘s Series 1-A round included participation from existing investors True Ventures, the New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) and some individual investors that include Scott Kurnit (About.com founder, CEO of AdKeeper) and Howard Lindzon (StockTwits co-founder and CEO).

Combined with the $3.1 million that these previous investors have put into Appssavvy, the company has raised $10.2 million to date.

The presence of AOL and New York Times as investors also points to how media and publishing companies are interested in also looking for new opportunities in their own properties.

The new funding will be used to expand appssavvy’s business activities in social ads, which is anchored by its new “adtivity” product. The company says its services are currently used by more than 125 publishers and advertisers.

Meanwhile, MediaBrix’s $4 million Series-B investment was led by Edison Ventures, whose principal, Ryan Ziegler, will join the MediaBrix board of directors along with Mike Leo of Operative, the advertising software company and another investor. This round takes the company to a total of $5.5 million in funding.

MediaBrix’s social ads platform, SocialFlex, is currently in beta and will be launching officially next year. At that time, the company will also be releasing an SDK to run the ads in apps—currently they only work on mobile web sites.

Ari Brandt, the new CEO of MediaBrix, tells us that so far that platform has had very strong engagement rates of around 25 percent. The units, which pop up in natural breaks during the game, are already running in various Facebook games including 50 Cubes, formspring and Puzzle Social, and runs ads from Nikon and several consumer package goods companies.

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News Corp./Time Warner's Prince Alwaleed Invests $300 Million In Twitter

2011-12-19T11:37:47Z

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, an investor in media titans News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), is turning his attention now to social media: he and his investment group, Kingdom Holding Company, today became the latest investors in Twitter, putting up $300 million for a strategic stake in the micro-bloging company.

The funding underscores how, while Twitter is slowly turning its attention to generating revenue on its social-media platform through advertising and marketing services, it is also still very much picking up huge injections of cash for faster growth.

It also raises the question of whether Twitter may put off thoughts of an IPO for the time being: this latest investment values the company at $10 billion, according to Jack Neele, a fund manager at Robeco Groep NV (via Bloomberg).

The deal follows an $800 million investment taken earlier this year by the Russian group Digital Sky Technologies (DST), and take Twitter’s total investments to just under $1.5 billion.

Not a fly-by-night prince: Kingdom Holdings, in a press release, noted that the deal was the result of several months of negotiations and due diligence on the part of the company.

It could signal a change in strategy for the company, which might be eyeing up other social media brands for further investments. Up to now, it has focused on some key stakes in regional operations, as well as some of the biggest, most established international media and tech properties:

—The company has invested $600 million in shares of News Corporation. Those shares include voting rights and the prince was the subject of some media attention earlier this year when we spoke out in support of the Murdochs during the height of the phone-hacking scandal. That investment has been used as a route to growing out News Corp.‘s footprint in the Arabic world.

—Kingdom Holdings and the Prince also have a stake of Time Warner: that came by way of its initial investment of $145 million in Netscape, which subsequently got bought by AOL (NYSE: AOL). The company made further, unspecified investments in Time Warner in subsequent years, and according to its site, has a similar strategy to the one it has taken with News Corp., to partner with Time Warner on regional investments in the Middle East.

—It also, very presciently, acquired five percent of Apple back in 1997, a steal for $115 million. It’s unclear if that stake has increased or decreased but it seems more of a straight rather than strategic investment.

—Other stakes that it has held include those in Motorola (NYSE: MMI), eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and HP (NYSE: HPQ).

—Regionally, it has a 29.9 percent stake in the publishers Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), and Rotana Group, a broadcasting JV with News Corp. The Prince also has plans to launch his own Arab news channel, Alarab.

Given Kingdom Holdings’ emphasis on building out regional operations based on strategic stakes, this could kick off an interesting chapter in the international growth of Twitter.

Twitter had already marked itself out during the “Arab spring” revolts as a key route for communicating not only among people on the ground, but also for communicating developments to the outside world.

Twitter’s platform, in its simplest form of exchanging short messages with a group of followers, is highly scalable, working not only on the web and smartphones but on the most basic of mobile handsets. That gives it a lot of potential in developing markets, as well as those that are more advanced.

Samsung Electronics Reorg: Apple's Friends On One Side; Foes On The Other?

2011-12-14T14:24:31Z

It looks like Samsung Electronics, the flagship and biggest division of the Samsung Group conglomerate, is restructuring its organisation. With a view to creating “independent operations”, the company is to divide its digital media business, including mobile devices and TVs and related services, from its device solutions business, which includes components like semiconductors.

The news was first reported by the Korea Herald, and we have contacted Samsung for more information about this direct from the company.

The article doesn’t give a huge amount of insight into why Samsung has enacted this restructuring, or whether there will be any job losses as a result of it, but it does note that one intention is to give more “power” to different divisions, such as semiconductors, to move quicker on business decisions.

One other consequence of the restructure could be that it puts up a greater Chinese wall between the division of the company that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) counts as a key supplier (components for its devices) and the division that Apple views as an arch rival (the mobile device business—and potentially TVs too).

The two people sit at the top of the organisation as co-vice chairmen will each lead one of the divisions, according to the article. Kwon Oh-hyun, who was only appointed vice chairman last week, will oversee device solutions, including chips and other components; while Choi Gee-sung will oversee the digital media division.

As part of what Samsung calls its “two-top” management system, that digital media/communications division looks like it will have two leaders within it: Yoon Boo-keun, who had previously overseen the visual display business, will lead the consumer electronics business. Shin Jong-kyun, until now the mobile chief, will be in charge of information technology and mobile.

Just as the announcement today will give more autonomy to the semiconductor division, it could also be an attempt to focus more on how the company is innovating on its devices.

The announcements were made at the same time that Samsung officially named ex-Googler/AOLer David Eun as a new EVP overseeing its media strategy, which we reported on earlier.

Media and content are clearly areas where Samsung feels it needs to grow to better compete not only with Apple and its one-two-punch of devices and content, but also companies like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and even HTC, which has made investments in media companies like Saffron Digital, OnLive and Beats Audio to beef up how it delivers content, to try to be seen as not just another Android OEM.

Samsung has made its own moves already into media services, with its own media hub that it launched in October 2010, its own app store for its bada feature devices and even special content services, such as the embedded music download service powered by 7digital. It’s not clear how much of an impact that music partnership has had for Samsung so far but it has proven to be a huge revenue driver for the music startup.

In keeping with the push into media and services, Samsung also said it would be establishing a new media solution center in Silicon Valley to build products aimed at better competing with Apple, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and others.

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Digital Content Vet David Eun Joins Samsung To Lead Global Media

2011-12-14T14:01:44Z

Samsung makes TVs, tablets, smartphones, music players, even refrigerators with connected displays. Now it wants to have a bigger say about the content that drives the sales and use of consumer electronics and is bringing on former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and AOL (NYSE: AOL) exec David Eun as EVP to lead the charge at Samsung Electronics.

The announcement comes at the same time as a major reorg that splits the company into two independent operating units for consumer goods and enterprise; Eun will advise across the company.

Eun will be responsible for helping Samsung develop a global media strategy that takes full advantage of the company’s connected device businesses. But his role is more than advisory—my understanding is he will manage investments and acquisitions, internal development and partnerships.

Why Samsung? Eun likes the “unparalleled footprint” across devices and platforms. From his official statement: “The competition for prominence in the living room has already begun, and Samsung Electronics is ideally situated to extend beyond that to connect the entire home and the lives of consumers,. I’m looking forward to joining the impressive leadership already in place and to building a new presence in media for Samsung Electronics.”

He brings a strong background in creating and managing media and content partnerships. Eun left as president of AOL Media and Studios in early 2011 when Arianna Huffingon took the company’s top content role as part of the acquisition of The Huffington Post. He followed Google vet Tim Armstrong to AOL in early 2010 after several years at Google where he was responsible for managing global content partnerships with Google and YouTube.

Eun will split his time between Seoul, New York and Silicon Valley as he gets grounded in the consumer electronics business from the hardware side.

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Another AOL Reorg: Dial-Up, Mobile And Web Services Report Directly To CFO

2011-12-13T14:18:38Z

On the back of its latest executive appointments—a new head of sales, and a new head of HR—AOL (NYSE: AOL) is pressing on with more reorganizing as CEO Tim Armstrong tries to turn around the fortunes of the jack-of-all-trades online company.

According to an interview with Armstrong in Bloomberg, the company is planning to combine its U.S. dial-up business with its web services business, which includes AOL’s mobile operations, and have the new unit report directly to the CFO, Arthur Minson. The change is expected to be announced formally to staff tomorrow, Wednesday, December 14; the other business divisions in place currently at AOL—advertising, local services and the Huffington Post media group—will remain the same.

Ned Brody will oversee advertising; Arianna Huffington will be in charge of her eponymous division and Jon Brod, founder of the Patch service, will leave his role under Huffington at present to head up local.

The news comes one day after the company recruited John Reid-Dodick from Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) as its new “chief people officer,” and two days after it announced that Jim Norton would be promoted to head of sales for the company.

Bloomberg notes that while AOL is not planning to sell off any of its assets at the moment, the reorg could also be a way of packaging up the dial-up and web services assets in the event that they are eventually spun off for the company to concentrate on content and advertising services around it.

This new division reporting to the CFO is something that AOL had in effect already put in place in November, when Brad Garlinghouse abruptly resigned as president of applications and commerce at the company: at the time, AOL put Garlinghouse’s division, which included mobile, under Minson’s command. Minson had already been overseeing the dial-up business.

Putting web services under the control of a CFO doesn’t exactly sound like AOL is getting ready make any bold or innovative (read: investment-intensive) changes in the immediate future. What it does sound like is that the company is trying to get its costs under control and look for existing areas in the applications business that might get better exploited for revenues.

Even with the huge takeup in broadband, the company still, remarkably, has 3.4 million subscribers paying $17.50 every month to access the internet via AOL’s dial-up services. That works out to $59.5 million per month in revenue.

Meanwhile, AOL is seeing precious few dividends coming from its web services. Now, we may see Minson try to re-jig those operations to yield returns more like those of that dial-up business. We’ve noted before one that exists already: the carrier deals that AOL has to provide AIM via text messages, which already mean that AOL Mobile is a profitable operation. Minson, if he remains in the role longer-term, may try to look at how AOL could align other existing products in a similar way.

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Did HuffPo Just Get 'Sex-Squatted'?

2011-12-12T15:53:44Z

Well, that was predictable. The chance to buy a “.xxx” domain is now open to the public and already someone appears to have used the opportunity to help themselves to the name of a famous media brand.

This morning, a domain name news site reported that California man Justin Crews purchased the website Huffingtonpost.xxx for between $80 and $100. And according to the site, Domain Name Wire, the man has no ties to HuffPo or its parent company AOL.

This is the first in what no doubt will be a steady drip-drip of stories about various major companies that forget to buy their domain names during a so-called sunrise period that has now expired. The oversight means that Huffington Post (and others) will have to wrest their names back from opportunists who bought the names first.

For those unfamiliar with how the domain business works, the “.xxx” episode is part of an ongoing initiative to expand the number of “dot somethings” that are available for sale. In recent years, the domain name industry has sprawled way beyond the familiar “.com” and “.org” and now offers such gems as “.biz” and “.travel” A slew more are on the way next year.

ICANN, the governing body that approves the names, claims the new domains are a splendid opportunity to develop commerce and the Internet. The companies that are in charge of maintaining the registries of names like them too because they get paid every time one is purchased.

Not everyone is so enthused, however. Many companies don’t see the point of the new names and regard them as little more than a shakedown in which they have to buy the names or else risk having them hijacked. (Does Disney (NYSE: DIS) want another company controlling “Disney.biz” or, worse yet, “Disney.xxx”?)

The expanded domain name system is expected to produce a huge cash windfall for ICANN which also gets paid when a domain is registered.

The “.xxx” domain name episode has already proved great fun for readers and headline writers alike. For brand owners, the situation is not so funny.

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El Huffington Post: Arianna Goes To Spain With El Pais Partnership

2011-12-12T12:37:41Z

The news aggregating behemoth Huffington Post is continuing its march into new markets: the next stop is Spain, where the site will partner with respected national daily El Pais to produce a local edition.

From the looks of it, El Huffington Post, as the new site is known, follows the template AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Arianna Huffington started with the French edition of the site, Le Huffington Post. There, HuffPo partnered with daily newspaper publisher Le Monde Group as well as Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendante. But in that deal, the two French publishers will share equity with AOL in the site, whereas in this deal it looks like no equity is changing hands, according to Capital New York.

The French site has yet to launch—a trip to a spoofed URL today took me to a password-protected page, similar to the holding page that existed for Huffington Post UK before it launched this past summer. Even so, the Huffington Post is also eyeing up a French Canadian edition. An English-language Canadian edition already exists.

Extending the footprint with the Spanish edition could prove much more lucrative when you consider the Spanish-speaking footprint in the Americas. Capital NY quotes Arianna Huffington’s own interest in how El Pais is a respected title worldwide as well as in its home country.

In both France and Spain, the deals point to how Huffington Post is looking to local brand power in its international strategy. But it also points to how newspapers in Europe are looking to established internet brands to further their reach online. Le Monde has erected a paywall for some of its own content.

It is also in contrast to the UK effort from the Huffington Post, the first to launch outside of North America. Here, HuffPo has gone it alone; currently has an editorial team of 18 plus an army of freelancers; and trumpets its “independent” editorial voice.

Some other interesting details coming out of the Capital New York report: The deal was only closed last Thursday; the Spanish edition will be based out of El Pais’ own offices; and there is a team of translators being hired to translate across the three languages to help syndicate the content. That points either to more North American content coming to those local sites, or more international coverage in the U.S. edition—or perhaps both.

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AOL Looks Internally For New Head Of Sales, Promotes Jim Norton

2011-12-09T18:31:41Z

Another executive move at AOL (NYSE: AOL), which has seen a fair few of them in the last several months: the company today announced that it has promoted Jim Norton to the position of head of sales, effectively immediately. Norton takes the place once held by Jeff Levick, the ex-Google (NSDQ: GOOG) executive who left amid a group of other executive changes.

Norton will report to Ned Brody, who was put into the new role of chief revenue officer at the same time that Levick left the company. (Levick is now in charge of sales at Spotify.)

AOL says that Brody will oversee sales on all of AOL’s owned and operated web properties, which includes high-traffic, ad-led sites like the Huffington Post, Engadget, Styleist and MapQuest. Curiously TechCrunch was left out of the list—but it is presumably included, too.

Other responsibilities will include sales for some of AOL’s other marketing initiatives, such as Project Devil, video and mobile sales.

This is a big job and arguably one of the most important, given how much the company’s business model relies on advertising around its content. Also, it’s no surprise to see AOL making an internal appoint for the role this time, choosing someone who has had experience overseeing various divisions within ad sales at the company. That’s one way to look at it, at least. The other is that he has held a lot of different jobs since joining the company in 2009. Most recently, Norton was SVP, AOL Advertising’s Advance Sales team, focusing on national and regional advertisers across all categories. Roles before that include VP of Product Sales and overseeing AOL’s Search and Sponsored Listings business, and helping launch AOL’s self service advertising platform, Ad Desk. He joined AOL from Google.

It will be interesting to see whether Norton will run things in a “business as usual” way or if he has some ideas for change. The company had a mixed bag of results for ad sales in its last quarterly earnings reported in November: display and third-party advertising were both up, but search ads revenue declined, and ads on its own sites, the biggest ad business of all for AOL, was nearly level with the year before, rising by only one percent to $221.8 million.

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