Dylan Hunter

Whew, does this one bring up some haunting memories of some very similar conversations we had back at ATW a long time ago. We, like AOL, were generating far and away more revenue from an older, dying, rev stream, with major downward pressure on it, (ours being white label B2B licensing fees - dropping even more precipitously than AOL’s - down 80% in 16 mths) with new customer win rates and renewals on our older line of business falling through the floor, again, as AOL’s.

We really had two major choices - either go whole hog consumer, turning ATW.com into a formal search portal, (we had been dancing around for 2 yrs). My opinion, this gave us both the highest degree of control over our future as well as highest long-term potential once we adjusted focus, but also required restructuring, as well as a strong leap of faith that our newer efforts would work, or shop around the internet business entirely, keeping it going via the older dying rev streams in the interim. In our case, the choice was made in favor of the status quo / liquidate - the lure of the drug of current revenue, even if dying, has, and will always be, amazingly powerful, making leaps of faith, especially when also requiring restructuring/firings, very hard to pull off. From the view up here in the Nosebleeds, I would agree that this is the right way for them to go, but we’ll have to see whether their Board bites.

Dulles, Va. - Two weeks away from pitching his radical plan to transform AOL into a free, ad-supported service, CEO Jonathan Miller is expected to call for thousands of layoffs and a “near halt” to marketing of the company’s trademark Internet service, The New York Times reported on Monday. Miller, who will detail his proposal to the board of parent Time Warner, is expected to “defend his unusually draconian plan by arguing that trying to wring every last dime from its dial-up subscribers is preventing AOL from being as aggressive as it can in competing with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on the web,” The Times reported, citing anonymous AOL executives. The plan, however, could be a tough sell to some board members, since they would initially have to accept lower profits until the company is able to boost its advertising revenue. The plan is scheduled for public announcement on August 2.
Link

BTW - Since I absolutely hate places that put content behind forced registrations, will hopefully be moving the above link away from the NYT very soon. Apologies to everyone for including links to this kind of crippled content if you hit this before then.