AOL’s Tim Armstrong Knows How to Play Nice With Others – Andrew Goldman via NYTimes.com
Goldman: AOL is a brand with a lot of baggage. It makes people remember that dial-up-modem sound and those free CDs.
Armstrong: 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.
Goldman: You’ve decided to turn it into a content company. But a year after spending $340 million to acquire the blog TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, traffic has barely budged.
Armstrong: Traffic actually is going way up on the properties where we’re investing for the future and pushing content. Huffington Post is up 46 percent. Numbers have been going down on some of the historical stuff: AIM went down, MapQuest went down and dial-up subscribers go down every year. So flat is up for us.
How can you counter that? Flat is the new up, Tim?
The brutal reality is that people’s aggregated media experience is rapidly shifting, and the rate of drift appears to be increasing. For example, TV sports grew 21% between ‘07 to ‘11, 15% more than TV as a whole. ‘Going to the movies’ is starting to look like a future vaudeville, with ‘11 US tickets falling to 1.29B, from the ‘02 peak of 1.5B.
People are spending their time looking at other things than AOL’s Patch. Oh, and Techcrunch US numbers have dropped like a rock, too, down ~40% in the past year. Huffington Post is booming, so I guess Goldman’s gibe — citing Paul Carr’s belief that Ariana HuffPo will be running AOL soon — might actually have merit.
