Yahoo, Aol | featured news

Yahoo is expected soon to hire a new chief of its crucial Americas division from Internet rival AOL Inc., said a person familiar with the matter. Ned Brody, who was the top advertising-sales executive at AOL, has resigned from the post to pursue "other opportunities," AOL said on Thursday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

AOL has been the sad sack of online media for so long now that it almost makes Yahoo look good. But at least the latest quarter showed the first year-over-year revenue growth in eight years–eight!–so it’s worth looking a little more closely at whether CEO Tim Armstrong has a handle on what can bring the Internet pioneer back from irrelevance.

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

From the department of weird ideas: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is apparently out peddling the idea that the company could sell itself to Yahoo. Question is, what makes him think Yahoo is buying? Reuters is reporting that Armstrong has been meeting with shareholders in recent weeks pushing the notion that an AOL/Yahoo combination could result ...

Slowly but steadily, Microsoft Bing has become a potent threat to Google in the search market. Over the last few months, Microsoft’s aggressive strategy with Bing has started to yield market share gains over competitors Google, Yahoo and AOL in the U.S. search market. Bing’s market share, which was around 11% in September 2010, is now close to 14% as of February 2011.

Yahoo's inability to snap out of a financial funk may be about to turn the Internet company into a takeover target for the second time in less than three years.