Tuesday, September 29, 2009
AOL’s Google Reunion Grows Yet Again: Former YouTube Ad Guy Shashi Seth Joins Up
Of 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.













I 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.
More 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.
Here 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.
Doesn’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.
Time 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?