Internet, Aol | featured news

The talent exodus continues at AOL. The latest to give her notice, according to Business Insider, is TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. Harde, a former News Corp. executive who joined TechCrunch five years ago, had stuck around after the site's founder, Michael Arrington, left in September after being stripped of his editorial duties in a very public confrontation with AOL editor in chief Arianna Huffington.

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.

That sound you hear isn't a 56k modem, it's the sound of my brain collapsing upon itself as I read AOL not only has 3.5 million dialup users, but gained 200,000 since last year... It can be because there are still large swaths of our country without broadband—mostly rural areas—and these people don't have any choice. That's why we lag behind much of the developed world when it comes to broadband penetration. The other reason, as Dan Frommer points out, is that many AOL subscribers probably don't realize they're still paying for the service. This must be a slightly (very slightly) reassuring scrap of foundation for AOL to rest its bloodied knees on: secluded farmland and ignorance. So, shhh! Don't tell anyone!

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 ...

Michael Arrington is leaving TechCrunch, the technology blog he founded in 2005 and sold to AOL for $30 million, for a recently formed venture fund, amid drama over his position at the company.

It has been a very long week for AOL. And it's about to get even longer. Last Thursday, word leaked that one of its employees, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, was launching a venture capital fund that would include an $8 million commitment from AOL (AOL). Then came a more official version via the NY Times, which included positive quotes from both Arrington and AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong.

What's a blogger to do when his blog is in turmoil? Well, blog about it, of course. Or, in the case of TechCrunch's MG Siegler, maybe "rant" is the more operative verb. On Tuesday morning, the powerful, frothy-mouthed tech blog's No. 2 man went off the digital rails, bemoaning a website that's "on the precipice" and "may be over" as we, the People of the Internet, know it.

Arrington will continue to write for the popular tech blog as he deploys $20 million in start-ups.

AOL shares have been under serious selling pressure for weeks now, thanks in part to a weaker-than-expected Q2 financial report that added to the Street?s growing concerns about whether the company?s turnaround strategy is actually going to work. The stock, which as recently as early July was north of $20, lately has been struggling to ...

AOL had a record decline in New York trading after reducing its annual earnings forecast, raising concerns that the company may not be able to turn itself around following the 2009 spinoff from Time Warner. AOL fell $3.88, or 26 percent, to close at $11.19 in New York Stock Exchange trading, the biggest drop and the lowest level since the spinoff. Earlier, the slump prompted a so-called circuit breaker that temporarily halted trading.