AOL announces staff reduction
AOL announced plans to reduce its work force by a third over the near future. AOL hopes that close to 2,500 employees will participate in a voluntary layoff program set for early December.
In recent years the former dial-up Internet service provider giant AOL has fallen upon hard times. The current economic downturn has been especially unkind. Last year its revenue dropped by 20 percent to $4.2 billion. This revenue drop-off was significant enough to negatively impact the bottom line of the parent company, Time Warner.
Industry watchers see this restructuring as one of the steps that Time Warner is taking to spinning AOL off on its own. Despite its troubles AOL still has some valuable and successful properties such as the celebrity news site TMZ, tech blog Engadget and map service Mapquest.
This is a far cry from its heyday during the dot-com boom era when AOL’s exploding share prices enabled it to swallow the Time Warner media empire. Its You got mail was almost synonymous with the Internet. It was an all-conquering force whose trial offer consisted of proprietary software in a 3.5-inch floppy disc. AOL stuffed these floppies into all kinds of printed publications. One would be hard pressed to find a user from that era who hasn’t reformatted one of these free discs instead of purchasing blank discs.
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