Tim Armstrong: Why I Left Google for AOL

If you guys want to do a great job with video, please use cutting-edge technology, or simply upload to YouTube!

There's only one problem with AOL. It's never going to be a dominant player. It's time for AOL to toss in towel and give up or get rolled up into Ask.com in my humble opinion. Seems like such a shame to toss Tim a $250,000 paycheck with perks for a company that is just barely on Life Support.

AOL is great demographic if all you want to target is Soccer Moms and a lot of Tweens working with censored videos of mediocre quality and carefully policed and screened AOL chat sessions. Nothing our customers are going to want to pay for ads on AOL.

The sad truth is, AOL has consistently been the BIGGEST loser in the Search Engine market for the past three years running.

ComScore published a report that the August 2007 snapshot of all Internet searches exceeded 11.8 billion. This means the total number of people searching for things, services, products or a new home. The break down of how the search pie got sliced up might surprise a lot of people.

America On Line was the big loser. AOL's search gateway was responsible for only $504 Million searches in August 2007, or just 4.3%.

Ironically, Ask.com, formerly AskJeeves.com did a bit better than AOL. They're now part of the Barry Diller empire but no matter how much money IAC throws as ask.com TV advertising, it's done very little to pull people away from Google. Ask.com users performed 569 million searches in August 2007, or 4.8%.

MSN was next up and resulted in 977M searches or 8.3%.

Yahoo was next in line and boasted a healthy 2.3 Billion total searches in August 2007 or 19.6%.

The big winner continues to be Google, and resulted in 7.4 Billion searches in August 2007 – a whopping 63% of the total pie.

I have yet to check everybody's 2008 numbers in detail, but AOL was the big loser again last year.

Good luck Tim. You're going to need lots of it.

- Bart Wilson
Voyager International | Santa Fe Office

Agree with walvarez, AdAge's video feature is archaic to say the least and is incredibly unreliable, refusing to play in certain browsers. Not a good way to brand the world's premiere advertising publication. Not sure why you continue to stick to this distribution method but it isn't getting me to view your videos, that's for sure!

The interview was interesting but buried the lead and didn't pursue the most interesting thread, in my view: the advertising insights that will lead AOL out of the wilderness.

http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2009/05/aols-future-our-phds-can-beat-up-your-phds.html