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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

AOL’s Google Reunion Grows Yet Again: Former YouTube Ad Guy Shashi Seth Joins Up

sethOf course, Time Warner’s AOL has hired yet another Google veteran. That’s what the company does under the Tim Armstrong regime. Today’s example: Shashi Seth, the one-time “monetization” boss at YouTube, who was most recently running sales at Cooliris. His new job: Senior vice president of global advertising products, reporting to Armstrong’s lieutenant (and Google vet, natch) Jeff Levick.

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Vevo, Universal Music’s Hulu for Video, Gets a Salesman

vevo-logoVevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like hub for its videos, is going to attract a lot of eyeballs when it launches later this year. Here’s the guy who’s supposed to attract advertisers: David Kohl, a former Nokia executive who starts work today as the site’s sales boss.

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Monday, September 21, 2009

AOL: More Org Chart Shuffles Coming; So Are Ad Dollars. But Mum on Microsoft.

092009ATDaolCEO Tim Armstrong says he’s still overhauling the Internet company in advance of its spinoff from Time Warner, but he has hopeful noises to make about ad sales. He has nothing, however, to say about chats with Microsoft.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Another AOL Org Chart Shuffle: COO Partoll, Search Boss Kannapell Out

kim partollThis isn’t the long-rumored round of mass layoffs, but AOL boss Tim Armstrong did let go of two executives today: COO Kim Partoll is out, as is John Kannapell, SVP of search and local media.

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BusinessWeek’s Pitch to Investors: Buy Us, Then Fire Us

clint-escapesHow do you sell a business magazine that lost $43 million last year? Convince buyers that they could fire 20 percent of the staff without missing a beat.

That’s part of the pitch Evercore Partners has been making to investors on behalf of McGraw-Hill, which wants to dump BusinessWeek. Look out, copy editors!

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Friday, September 4, 2009

Why Buy When You Can Hire? Time Warner Cable Gets a Joost Guy.

jason-gaedtkeWhat happens to a start-up whose business never materializes? One option is to try to peddle the company based on the value of its human capital–aka the “acqhire.” Or would-be employers can simply wait for the start-up to flame out, then pick up the people they want on an a-la-carte basis. Did that just happen with Time Warner Cable and former Joost CTO Jason Gaedtke?

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Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Google Still Shuffling Sales Force: “Self-Serve” Exec David Fischer Steps Aside

fischerFive months after Google sales boss Tim Armstrong left for AOL, his old company is still reshaping its sales group. The latest move: David Fischer, who ran the company’s core self-serve ad business, is going on sabbatical later this month and will return to a different post. Newish sales boss Nikesh Arora says he hasn’t found a successor for Fischer and will step into his shoes in the meantime.

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Friday, August 21, 2009

News Corp. Recruiting for Its Pay-to-Play Web Gang

anchormanThe owner of The Wall Street Journal tries to convince other publishers join up and charge readers for online news. Tough job! Even tougher: Creating news worth paying for.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller Out. Here’s the Internal Memo.

jim-spanfellerForbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, who has run one of the Web’s biggest finance sites for the last nine years, is leaving the company at the end of the summer. No replacement has been named. Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications.

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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Here Comes the Video Shakeout: Joost Scales Down, CEO Mike Volpi Steps Out

volpiHere’s the beginning of the inevitable online video shakeout: Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival Google’s YouTube, is restructuring to focus on “white label” services, i.e., a back end for other video players.

The site is laying off the majority of its 100-plus employees, and CEO Mike Volpi is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering.

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

AOL Lands Another Media Refugee: Portfolio.com’s Bercovici to DailyFinance

bercoviciI don’t usually write about writers landing jobs, but I did want to point out that Jeff Bercovici, last seen writing the Mixed Media blog for Portfolio.com, has landed at DailyFinance, a site run by Time Warner’s AOL. Why do I care? Because it’s yet another sign that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters to bulk up its sites as other publishers are slimming down or shutting down. And because it’s a nice change of pace from layoff stories.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

More Tim Armstrong Fallout: Departures at Google, AOL

merry-go-roundMore ripple effects from Tim Armstrong’s departure from Google to run AOL for Time Warner: Tom Phillips, Google’s director of search and analytics, is out. No word on whether he has a new job lined up, but he apparently won’t be joining Armstong and former Googler Jeff Levick at AOL. Still, the chatter is that Armstrong will bring over more Google vets before he’s done making over his team.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Microsoft Starts the Layoff Machine Again With Thousands of Cuts: Steve Ballmer’s Memo to the Troops

ballmerHere comes the second round of layoffs at Microsoft, following a first round that started in January. Today’s cuts will likely end up costing about 3,000 workers their jobs. Microsoft had previously warned that it would cut up to 5,000 jobs by 2010. The good news, says CEO Steve Ballmer: The newest round means “we are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. Here’s Ballmer’s memo to the troops.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Another Googler Gone: DoubleClick Boss David Rosenblatt Leaves for… Nothing

rosenblattDoesn’t anybody want to sell ads for the world’s biggest media company anymore? David Rosenblatt, the former CEO of DoubleClick, who joined Google when it acquired his company last year, is leaving May 15. A person familiar with Rosenblatt’s plans says he doesn’t have a job lined up and plans to take the summer off. He’s the fourth top ad sales executive at Google to step down since March.

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Will Time Inc. Have to Cut Again?

ann-mooreTime Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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