Which is good, because here’s another one: BuzzFeed, the online publishing start-up that’s the toast of people who like to write about online publishing start-ups, is adding a tech section run by Gizmodo star Matt Buchanan.

This follows a now-familiar pattern we’ve seen from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Last month, Peretti brought on Politico star Ben Smith to start up the site’s political coverage and to run its overall editorial operations. A couple of weeks ago, he hired Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone’s Web site to oversee “culture” coverage for the site.

Now Buchanan*, a five-year veteran of Gawker Media’s gadget-obsessed site, will start a new “vertical,” along with John Herrman from Popular Mechanics.

All of this hiring comes as Peretti is flush with cash courtesy of a $15 million funding round, and has reconnected with many of the people he used to work with at Huffington Post, which he co-founded.

Fellow HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer is also a BuzzFeed co-founder, and former HuffPo ad boss Greg Coleman has come on as an advisor. Everyone who types about the media business likes writing about Peretti, but if you haven’t read any of this yet, I’d suggest starting with this New York Observer profile.

Buchanan and his crew will start publishing in mid-February, says Smith, who says the coverage will be something like what Buchanan did at Gizmodo, and also nothing like it. Think more “tech culture,” and less “stuff about gadgets.”

Well, maybe you should hold off on calling it “tech culture,” too, Smith says. “I guess I hesitate to call it tech culture, because I don’t think there’s a clear line between tech and culture anymore.”

Okay. So what’s next up in the BuzzFeed expansion plan? There’s got to be a bunch of cash left, right? “There will be more. Stay tuned.”

And now, a lightly edited version of a superfast exit interview I conducted via IM with Buchanan, who I gather is headed out for a couple of drinks as I type this.

Peter Kafka: Why’d you leave Gawker Media? I know lots of people have come to you in the past. Why go now?

Matt Buchanan: It’s an opportunity to build something completely new on a really exciting platform, which, even though the hallmark of Gizmodo is the immense freedom we all have, you know, the one thing I can never get here is the chance to do it all from scratch. And to do something that’s different from what a lot other tech sites are doing, I hope. I do love Gawker, and everybody here. I was from the generation that never got screwed over, so I only have good things to say about it.

Kafka: So should we be looking elsewhere for unboxing coverage, liveblogs of Android OS unveilings, and other blow-by-blow standards of tech coverage? Or will you leave all that behind?

Buchanan: Leaving almost all of that behind. I think technology deserves writing and criticism at the same level as any other aspect of culture, like film or music, because the reality of our world now is that it is just as important as those things. It is mainstream culture now. So we want to do tech for humans, as a main thing — but I also want hardcore tech readers to like what they see, too.

Like, we’ll talk about phones and gadgets to the extent that we find it interesting, and that other people might find it interesting, but no, this isn’t another gadget site. I would like to note that it is the first technology site powered entirely by ginger tears, which is what I’m most excited about.

Kafka: Curious about your take on your new employer. Seems to me that, while they’re uncomfortable saying this out loud, Jonah and crew are really setting out to build a new version of HuffPo: Build site by aggregating/curating, etc., other people’s content, then use that momentum/money to hire their own folks to build on that. The big obvious difference is that there isn’t a personality driving it from the get-go. And it’s tuned more to social than to search. Thoughts?

Buchanan: Yes! I think it’s too early to tell for some of that — even for me — but what I’m into is the fact that it’ll give John and I the freedom and flexibility to do the kind of tech writing and journalism that we want to do.

*Disclosure: I’ve met Matt a couple times, have chatted with him online a few more times, and I like him. He’s also an excellent resource if you’re planning a trip to Momofuku Ssäm (which you should definitely do, unless you’re a vegetarian) and need help with your ordering strategy.

Berry, who had been Huffpo’s chief technical officer, stepped back from day-to-day duties in November; at the time, the company said he’d be “working closely” with Arianna Huffington “on strategy and expansion priorities.”

Now Berry says he will be leaving in February — which happens to be a year after the AOL/Huffpo deal was announced. Berry will be working on Rebel Mouse, which he described to the New York Observer as a “social platform,” and will also work on a start-up incubator.

As the Observer notes, the move will reunite Berry with a good chunk of Huffpo’s senior team — co-founders Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti, former CEO Eric Hippeau and former ad chief Greg Coleman. Most of that group left Huffpo as soon as the AOL deal closed.

Peretti, who now runs Buzzfeed, a son-of-Huffpo aggregator/news site with a flair for social media, credited Berry with much of Huffpo’s success, via a Twitter blessing:

When Paul Berry joined HuffPost had 3M UVs, today the site has 120M million & he deserves LOTS of credit for that growth

— Jonah Peretti (@peretti) January 10, 2012

[Shutterstock/Kutlayev Dmitry]

Well-known online advertising exec Frank Weishaupt, who recently ran North American marketplaces for Yahoo, will join ad display performance firm Criteo to head up sales.

Weishaupt, who left Yahoo several months ago, will be based in Boston and will be hiring up to 100 salespeople. He’ll report to another former top Yahoo sales exec, Criteo President Greg Coleman.

Interestingly, one of the pair’s most pressing challenges going forward will be the recent move of Yahoo to block “retargeting” firms.

In a post last week, Peter Kafka wrote that Yahoo told Criteo and others that “it would stop selling them its ‘Class 2’ remnant inventory, which the companies used to purchase on behalf of clients and essentially resell at a premium. The idea, theoretically, is that Yahoo will sell more of those ads itself.”

Here’s the official press release:

CRITEO TAPS FRANK WEISHAUPT AND EXPANDS FOOTPRINT; OPENS BOSTON OFFICE

Leading online advertising performance platform expands US presence with Boston office and hires Former Yahoo! digital media veteran

PALO ALTO, CA — (NOVEMBER 14, 2011) – Criteo, the global leader in performance display today announced that Frank Weishaupt, former Vice President, North American Advertising Marketplaces at Yahoo!, will join the company as SVP of Sales. The company also announced the continued expansion into the US Market with the opening of an office in Boston, which will focus on sales and service to mid-market advertisers and publishers. With offices in over three continents, Criteo now employees over 400 employees while serving personalized ads on behalf of over 1200 e-commerce clients across 20 countries globally.

“Criteo is committed to bringing performance to the display advertising landscape,” said Greg Coleman, President of Criteo. “I am thrilled to have Frank, a true industry veteran with a very successful track record of scaling sales organizations, join the team to continue our momentum. Our goal at Criteo is to bring our solution to a wide variety of advertisers and publishers, and Frank will be focused on helping meet that objective.”

As a 15 year digital media veteran, one of Weishaupt’s key priorities will be to build a sales organization in Boston focused on mid-market advertisers and publishers. Weishaupt has been a key part of exponential growth for several of the world’s most influential digital media companies.

“Criteo has created a name for itself as the global leader in performance display advertising. I am excited to have joined a company that is committed to growth and a team with such passion to drive this industry forward,” said Frank Weishaupt, SVP of Sales at Criteo.

Prior to joining Criteo, Weishaupt held several key management at Yahoo! over a 10-year period. Most recently he had General Management responsibilities for the US Display, Search, and Ad Technology businesses. The focus of the role was overall monetization strategy, pricing and yield management, strategic direction of the Yahoo! Ad Network, and general management of the ad platforms and global exchange.

Weishaupt holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Northeastern University.

Criteo is hiring and looking for team members to join the global leader in performance online advertising marketing.

One of Yahoo’s biggest problems — brain drain — has turned out to be an asset for private equity firms and other players interested in figuring out their best moves related to the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

A plethora of ex-Yahoos, including many former top execs, are getting buttonholed by those who want to know more about the inner workings of the company that might not be obvious from its copious financial data available publicly.

That includes former Americas head Hilary Schneider, who has a longer-term consulting gig with TPG Capital, one of the several PE firms that has recently signed a non-disclosure agreement with Yahoo; former COO and President Sue Decker, who has had a longtime informal relationship with Blackstone, which has not signed the NDA and has been in talks with Yahoo’s Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank; and even former CEO Carol Bartz, who sources say has also been contacted to get her insights.

She is one of many in that regard, in a large pool of former Yahoos, such as: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who had run Yahoo’s media efforts; Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, former Yahoo COO; SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, who ran swathes of Yahoo’s entertainment properties; Criteo CEO Greg Coleman, former Yahoo sales head; former CEO Terry Semel, who is now an investor; former communications exec Brad Garlinghouse, who is now at AOL; and Demand Media Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford, who also was a top Yahoo advertising exec.

Not all are cooperating with the requests for a chitchat about Yahoo, but there is much incoming interest in ex-Yahoos and what they might know.

There’s lots more where that came from, from all parts and all levels of Yahoo, given the breadth of the exes now doing very well — thank you very much — throughout the tech and media industries.

Thus, calls from PE firms, from Silver Lake to Bain Capital to Providence Equity Partners, as well as interest from major and majorly irritated shareholders, such as activist hedge fund investor Dan Loeb.

It’s a smart idea to tap this rich vein of information, as all contemplate possible multi-billion-dollar investments.

While some of these execs have not worked at Yahoo in many years, all have significant knowledge about the challenges and also the culture that cannot be gleaned from spreadsheets.

They also know a lot about the internal politics and personalities of the existing inside players, too. More importantly, several were involved in similar previous major business decisions at Yahoo.

Decker, for example, was a key exec in the Yahoo takeover attempt by Microsoft several years ago; Schneider and Bartz were deeply involved in striking the advertising and search partnership with Microsoft.

“Between everyone, it’s a good way to figure out where all the bodies are buried,” said one person close to the situation. “And there are a lot of bodies.”

Greg Coleman, the online advertising sales exec who keeps making bank after bouncing from top Web jobs, has a new one.

The former Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post sales leader has just taken over as president of Criteo, a “personalized retargeting” company–essentially, it delivers highly targeted ads to consumers.

Coleman said in an interview with BoomTown last night that he will be focused on expanding Criteo’s U.S. business.

“Performance advertising is a huge opportunity in a high-growth arena,” he said. “I couldn’t pass it up.”

While the 300-person company has offices in Silicon Valley and New York, its HQ is in Paris.

So, Coleman (pictured here)–who has grabbed huge sums of exit cash, first when AOL management changed and then when AOL bought the HuffPo–now gets to visit the City of Lights all the time.

Zut alors! As I have previously written, I’ll have what Coleman’s having.

Toby Coppel, an investor in Criteo who is also on its board, worked with Coleman at Yahoo.

Criteo has raised almost $24 million from Coppel and other investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

Its competitors are other start-ups, such as MyThings.

Here’s the official press release on Coleman’s new job:

CRITEO TAPS GREG COLEMAN AS PRESIDENT

Former Huffington Post president and Yahoo! sales chief will take retargeting leader to the “next phase of phenomenal expansion”

PALO ALTO, CA – (April 7, 2011)–Criteo, the global leader in personalized retargeting, today announced that Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post and EVP global sales for Yahoo!, will join the company as president. Coleman will oversee global operations and lead the U.S. expansion of the company, whose platform for delivering personally relevant ads to Internet users has enabled the largest e-commerce marketers to post significant incremental sales for the past three years.

“Greg is a visionary who raises the bar,” said JB Rudelle, CEO of Criteo. “With his experience and relationships, we will extend our e-commerce solutions to new clients, deepen our engagement with existing customers, and bring industry appreciation of retargeting to new levels.”

Coleman has caused explosive sales growth for several of the world’s most influential media and technology companies. As the president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post, he built a $30 million ad business in one year. As EVP global sales at Yahoo!, he assembled a pre-eminent sales team that grew ad revenues from $600 million to more than $6 billion. As president of U.S. Magazine publishing for Reader’s Digest Association, he turned advertising from an afterthought to more than 25% of corporate profit. Coleman’s experience has translated to the top-ranked class for three years running at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

“Performance advertising is marketing’s new frontier, and it’s still wide open,” said Coleman. “Technology and sales will determine leadership. Criteo has the premier technology for personalizing the advertising experience. The company originated the worldwide market, is the leader in Europe, and has a secure foothold in the U.S., because the technology is the most reliable and scalable. I’m here to spur the next phase of phenomenal expansion.”

Criteo tripled operations in 2010, grew to 300 employees and served more than 50 billion personalized ads on behalf of more than 1,000 e-commerce companies across 20 countries globally–driving an 11x increase in incremental post-click revenues for clients. Criteo technology enables merchants to win back the consumers who leave their websites before completing purchases, and gives advertisers a single source for complete retargeting campaigns–design, buying, serving, optimization and reporting.

By colleagues’ accounts, Coleman has the assets to increase Criteo’s momentum. Former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau calls him “a true innovator” and says he “created the model for selling social marketing.” And former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel calls him “the most wired, successful and liked sales executive in Internet marketing.”

“Greg creates unique partnerships with advertisers and merchants,” added investor and Criteo board member Toby Coppel. “He can make Criteo the industry standard.”

AOL CFO Artie Minson prepped investors for the call with a memo laying out expectations. Short version: AOL thinks HuffPo will earn about $10 million on revenue of $50 million this year (as long as you’re okay with using “adjusted OIBDA” as a proxy for “profit”). It also thinks the purchase will save it $20 million a year, but it’s going to spend around $20 million on restructuring charges when the deal goes through.

I’ll liveblog the call below:

8:02 am: Greetings! About to start now.

8:03 am: On the call: Tim Armstrong, Arianna Huffington, Artie Minson.

8:03 am: Armstrong makes a Super Bowl joke that I can’t quite follow, and I like football. But now praising Arianna, co-founder Kenny Lerer and outgoing AOL CEO Eric Hippeau.

“The Huffington Post is one of the best properties on the Internet.” Armstrong, Huffington and Minson are all BlackBerry users.

8:06 am: On revenue: This gives an opportunity to serve more brand marketers, who are “very interested” in the scale this gives us.

8:07 am: Spending next 30 days on integration. “Really synergies to be had.”

Next steps: Next 72 hours communicating with employees, talking to partners. 1,500 AOL workers on the phone this morning explaining deal to others.

“This may be the smallest disruption” internally of any deal I’ve worked on. Majority of integration done within 35 to 40 days.

8:09 am: We’ve looked at a bunch of companies, though we’re mainly going to concentrate on organic growth. But Arianna is great [many superlatives] and she “also happens to be a woman.”

8:10 am: Here’s Arianna.

8:11 am: “Amazing” how aligned two orgs are.

8:11 am: HuffPo was profitable last year. We were thinking about bringing in additional investors last year, and an IPO down the line. But this made perfect sense.

8:12 am: This deal provides a “dramatic acceleration” for the plans we already had.

8:13 am: Some praise for Patch, AOL’s local strategy.

8:14 am: Can’t wait to start!

8:14 am: Alrighty, then. Here’s Artie Minson with some nuts and bolts.

Actually, it’s some color on the deal. But a lot of it is in the prepared remarks he put out earlier this morning.

8:15 am: Again, $20 million in cost savings here. And again, we’ll have to pay up for restructuring: $20 million for cuts, and $10 million for purchase price.

8:17 am: Still basically reading from prepared remarks. Some bookkeeping talk re: compensation accounting.

8:18 am: Remember, display ad growth coming will finally start showing up second half of this year.

8:19 am: Q&A:

Q: Talk about content strategy. Does HuffPo become hub for content going forward? Does it replace Seed? And how long is Arianna’s contract?

A: “The press” has been talking about our content strategy, so let me be clear–we’re focusing on premium content. Things like Seed and StudioNow are platforms–you can do whatever you want with them, different quality levels, at different types of scale.

And then the other thing that is important about those platforms is the ability they give us to work with advertisers.

One of our main interests in HuffPo is their technology and publishing system. So now we have multiple systems [which he is saying is a good thing]. “Our content strategy hasn’t changed.” The “stuff that was out in the press about the AOL Way” was just one way of doing things. [This is not very convincing]

Arianna, tell us how long you’re going to stay.

8:24 am: Arianna: “I’ve told Tim I want to stay here forever. I want this to be the last act of my life.” Anything I want to do I can do here.

[Sorry, missed next part but it was a defense/explanation of content strategy.]

8:26 am: Armstrong: Arianna has a multiyear contract, but it’s open-ended.

8:27 am: Arianna: By the way, we’re going to bring back commenting to AOL stories, and socialize them.

8:28 am: Q: Why buy instead of partnering? Were there other bidders? Also, how will HuffPo politics affect AOL?

8:28 am: Armstrong: We do partnerships where there is “limited upside to those arrangements” so ” we can really spend time on the areas we want to win”–i.e., we don’t care about sports, we do care about women.

“Arianna is somebody we’d rather have inside our building than outside our building.”

“If there were or weren’t bidders on the other side,” I think we got the right price.

8:30 am: Arianna. “As we’ve said, again and again, Huffington Post was not for sale….Nobody was in a hurry to cash out, everybody believed that we could do an IPO down the road.” It’s just that Tim gave us a great offer. [hrrrm.]

On politics–we used to be all about politics, now we’re not. Just 15 percent of our traffic. We have a divorce section now.

Talking up AOL’s “college” section.

8:33 am: Q: For Arianna: More on Patch, please. What do think about what AOL’s done with it, and what you can do with it?

8:33 am: [Every time Arianna says "local level" I think she's saying "locker level." It's happened at least twice, maybe more, on this call.]

There’s a “greatest person of the day” feature we have, and I think Patch should use that. [Or maybe vice-versa, sorry.] I also like their five percent “giving back” rule, cause marketing, etc.

8:35 am: Armstrong: Again, we can do national and local. That’s important. NFL rights are important, and so are local news stories.

8:36 am: Q: Who’s going to sell what? And can you talk about pricing disparity between AOL and HuffPo?

8:37 am: Armstrong: “We would like to maintain all the people from both sales forces [except for Greg Coleman!]. I think we will end up with a large-scale, large-property organization–I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, though.

On sell-through rate: Slightly lower at HuffPo, because they’ve been ramping up traffic, and sales force. On CPM, same story. So we can bring up sell-through rate and CPM, and have a larger sales force. [This is pretty much the best argument for the deal that Armstrong can make.]

[BTW: Good back-channel discussion on Twitter right now about AOL's SEO skills, and the people behind it. None of that coming up during this call right now.]

[Sorry, I meant HuffPo's SEO skills, much of which stem from blueprint BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti set out.]

Q: Why not use equity for this deal?

A: Because our equity is priced too low, essentially. But HuffPo employees did roll over 25 percent of deal consideration into AOL options. So as that equity gets more valuable, they’ll get upside.

8:45 am: Q: In your statement, you talked about OIBDA growth in 2013. More on that please.

Minson–probably going to stick to my prepared remarks on that one.

8:46 am: Last Q: Your acqusitions have been about toolsets or content. As you think about others going forward, what else do you want?

Armstrong: We have long-term vision. On plumbing: We’ve wanted to get platforms and plumbing straightened out, and we’re doing that now. Think about the bones or foundation of a very large property. That’s why we’ve been doing infrastructure, like with video–5Min and GoViral and StudioNow.

Going forward, we’ll be doing infrastructure. And we’ll continue to look at “media properties and media brands” that fit our strategy. [Remember, Web site owners: HuffPo just got 10x revenue.

8:50 am: Minson: But we're very price sensitive and we've walked away from deals.

8:50 am: Arianna: And we like women!

8:51 am: Armstrong sums up: Success "in the Internet space" requires vision and execution. That's this deal. And remember, content and brands become more valuable as tech gets faster, more advanced. And "expect us to stay on strategy and on point" going forward. "We're going to overcommunicate" with both sets of employees as we integrate. [You've been warned!]

And we’re done. Thanks for reading.

[Photo credit: Arianna Huffington]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is the gift that keeps on giving–at least to Greg Coleman.

He’s the Chief Revenue Officer at the Huffington Post, for which the Internet giant just forked over $315 million to acquire.

Sources said Coleman, who has run advertising sales at the privately held news and opinion site since the fall of 2009, will get a multimillion dollar payday from the deal, even though he is not staying on after it closes, since AOL has its own top ad guy.

Except that this is the very same Greg Coleman who had been running ad sales for AOL for only two weeks when Armstrong took over from ousted CEO Randy Falco in February of 2009.

Coleman was gone from AOL by the end of April, replaced by Armstrong with current ad sales head Jeff Levick.

And for those three months of work Coleman got paid out his entire three-year AOL contract.

Not bad work if you can get it.

Actually, many credit Coleman’s energetic work at the Huffington Post for turbocharging its ad sales revenue to $31 million in 2010 and projected revenue upward of $60 million in 2011.

Coleman is an experienced online ad exec who was at Yahoo for seven years, responsible for all advertising revenue worldwide. He came to Yahoo from Reader’s Digest.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzz saw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

But Yahoo’s ad business did grow strongly under him and former Yahoo ad exec Wenda Millard.

Before AOL, Coleman ran a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focused on ad targeting.

Memo to soon-to-be unemployed Greg: You’re definitely buying lunch next time I see you, and keep in mind that BoomTown is feeling partial to caviar.

Steve Case is right to point out that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “one plus one equals eleven” logic didn’t pan out during the first boom, when Case was running AOL and engineered the disastrous Time Warner deal.

But here, at least, both companies are trying to do the same thing: Make a lot of Web stuff at a low price, and sell ads against it.

So maybe AOL + HuffPo won’t equal 11. And maybe 10x Huffington Post’s reported 2010 revenue is a very pre-Lehman multiple. But the broad strokes here make sense to me:

AOL is pushing its workers very hard to make more content it can sell. HuffPo is a content-making machine:

Huffington Post still has the reputation as a left-leaning political site written by Arianna Huffington’s celebrity pals. In reality, it is most concerned with attracting eyeballs anyway it can. Sometimes it’s with well-regarded investigative journalism, and much more often it’s via very aggressive, very clever aggregation. And sometimes it’s by simply paying very, very close attention to what Google wants, which leads to stories like “What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?“

However they’ve done it, it’s worked–much more efficiently than AOL, which is headed in that direction as well. AOL reaches about 112 million people in the U.S. every month with a staff of 5,000. The Huffington Post, which employed about 200 people prior to the deal, gets to about 26 million.*

AOL can start selling this stuff immediately:

HuffPo reportedly generated around $30 million in revenue last year, but that was done using a relatively small staff that sales chief Greg Coleman had just started building. AOL’s much bigger sales group, which has just about finished its lengthy reorg, should be able to boost that performance immediately.

AOL can afford it:

Tim Armstrong’s company ended 2010 with $725 million in cash, much of which it generated by selling off old assets. This seems like a relatively easy check to write and one that shouldn’t involve a lot of overlapping staff–AOL figures it will save $20 million annually in cost overlaps, but that it will spend about $20 million this year on restructuring charges. HuffPo is about four percent of AOL’s size, and several of its top executives are already stepping aside. (This is the second time in two years that sales boss Greg Coleman has been moved out of a job by Tim Armstrong.) The biggest risk here will be in the way that Huffington, who is now editor in chief for all of AOL’s edit staff, gets along with her new employees. On the other hand, morale is low enough at many AOL sites that it will be hard to make things worse.

AOL Gets a Really Big Brand:

There’s some downside risk to attaching Arianna Huffington’s name to a big, mainstream media brand, as her politics and/or persona might scare off some readers and/or advertisers. But two years after Armstrong arrived from Google, AOL still doesn’t have a definable identity, other than “the Web site your parents might still pay for even though there’s no reason to do so.” Being known as “the guys who own Huffington Post” is infinitely better than that.

HuffPo’s “pro” list is much shorter, but only because there’s not much to think about for them: Huffington, co-founder Kenneth Lerer and their backers get a nice return on the five years and $37 million they put into the company. And those who stay on get to leverage the benefits of a much larger acquirer–access to more eyballs and more advertisers. Easy enough to understand.

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*(Something about these numbers, culled from AOL’s and Huffington Post’s own releases, doesn’t add up, as AOL now says the combined company will have 117 million uniques. But it’s close enough for now.)

In a bold and definitive move, AOL is paying $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy the Huffington Post, one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites.

As part of the deal, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–who was derided by some when she co-founded the left-leaning site in 2005 with investor and well-known communications exec Kenneth Lerer–will become president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL.

The deal was signed late this afternoon, and the board of directors of each company and shareholders of the privately held Huffington Post have approved the transaction.

In an exclusive video interview BoomTown conducted earlier today in Dallas, just before Super Bowl XLV, both Armstrong and Huffington were jovial that the whirlwind deal, begun in November, actually worked out so quickly.

Perhaps giddy, they hit upon a common motto:

“One plus one equals 11.”

Get it? One and one next to each other is the number 11!

Let’s move on, shall we?

AOL said it is expected to close in the late-first or early-second quarter of 2011.

Once culminated, it will put Huffington in charge of all AOL content and other properties, including well-known names such as Engadget, Moviefone, MapQuest and TechCrunch.

She said she plans to move to New York from Los Angeles, although she will also maintain her longtime Brentwood home there.

And content for all these sites will be integrated deeply into the Huffington Post, giving it a huge new infusion of editorial material.

More to the point, the flashy acquisition–which essentially came together in less than two weeks in January–will become the linchpin of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s aggressive, if risky, strategy to focus the long-troubled company as a content and advertising powerhouse.

For AOL, the deal gives it a popular branded site that is very good at generating lots of page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days.

That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL the scale it desperately needs.

The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have.

In fact, many think AOL needs a rallying point to bring clarity to its hodgepodge of recent acquisitions that all center on the notion that a strong company has yet to emerge in the premium content space.

Here is a mock-up of the front page of AOL tonight (click on it to make it larger):

While it all makes for a riveting narrative by the charming Armstrong, AOL still has not delivered the business turnaround promised after its spinoff from Time Warner in 2009.

Wall Street, which has given Armstrong a lot of rope, has become more impatient of late to see results–especially more robust increases in its display advertising business, as its access business dies off–after AOL spun off from Time Warner in 2009.

In its quarterly report last week, AOL reported earnings of 61 cents a share on revenue of $596 million.

But, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote:

The bigger picture is that Armstrong’s turnaround is still in progress. Ad revenue was down 29 percent in the last quarter, although that number is worse than it looks. A big chunk of the decline comes from moves AOL has intentionally made that will cut revenue in the short run in return for more profitable sales down the road.

A more representative data set for Armstrong are his display ad sales, which are down 14 percent overall and eight percent in the U.S..

The bad news is that the rest of the Web ad industry is well into rebound mode; the good news is that AOL has trained Wall Street to expect numbers like these. If you’re waiting to see positive sales numbers, Armstrong said during AOL’s earnings call this morning, wait until the second half of this year.

In any case, the move is a good one for the Huffington Post since it will vault it to the next level of growth.

Other companies, such as Yahoo and NBC Universal, had looked at the company as a purchase target, and many expected it to eventually sell out to a larger company.

Sources close to the Huffington Post said that that outcome seemed the most likely, and the recent expansion of the site and its audience made it a good time to do a deal now.

Talks with Yahoo last year went nowhere, sources said, but Armstrong was not as slow to act.

Indeed, the actual deal happened quickly, said Armstrong and Huffington in a video interview with BoomTown earlier today (which you can see here).

The pair started talking in early November of last year at the Quadrangle Conference in New York and continued their discussions through the holidays.

Armstrong made the official offer to Huffington by phone in January, while she was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he was snowed in in New York.

Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s upward of $60 million in expected revenue for the coming year, and nearly 10 times the $31 million for 2010, the offer was accepted quickly.

AOL used cash for $300 million of the purchase and $15 million in stock for the rest.

“The idea of turning a fire hose of traffic onto our content made enormous sense,” said one person close to the situation. “Everything is changing so fast, it seemed like the time was right.”

An IPO was also considered for the Huffington Post, sources said. But since the site only recently moved into profitability–although barely–such an event would have been farther out.

That’s despite the fact that the Huffington Post has seen fast-growing traffic and influence, spurred in part by Huffington’s larger-than-life persona in both the mainstream media and blogosphere.

The wide-ranging site–which has added a number of content areas in recent years beyond its flagship political offering–currently has almost 26 million unique monthly visitors, according to recent stats, moving in close range to established news organizations such as the New York Times.

That kind of success seemed unlikely when the Huffington Post launched on May 9, 2005, positioning itself as as a liberal counterweight to the popular right-leaning Drudge Report.

But the Huffington Post’s heady mix of celebrity bloggers, personality and voice, as well as aggressive curation of links from other sites, quickly caught on.

To fund its efforts, the New York-based online media company has raised $37 million from angel investors such as Lerer–the largest individual shareholder, followed closely by Huffington–and venture firms such as Greycroft Partners, Softbank Capital and Oak Investment Partners.

The growth has not been without controversy around issues such as lack of payments to bloggers who contribute and accusations that the site uses too much content from other Web sources when linking.

And Huffington herself has also been a lightning rod, which has been both positive and negative for the site.

But, there is no question she is one of the Web’s most prominent players, along with writing books, appearing on television frequently and being a fixture at high-profile events in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

That includes a never-ending panoply of parties that feature a potent mix of movie stars, corporate poo-bahs, glad-handing politicians and lots of journalists from all over the media.

In fact, full disclosure, I was at one of those parties this past weekend for actor Colin Firth and others involved in the making of the Oscar-nominated film “The King’s Speech.” (Apropos of nothing, actor Helena Bonham Carter is as smart as you would expect, but much more delicate.)

As part of the AOL deal, CEO Eric Hippeau–who has been integral to professionalizing the business and will be joining Lerer Ventures–and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman will leave the Huffington Post.

Ironically, Coleman was replaced by Armstrong as head of ad sales at AOL after he took over as CEO. Coleman got a big payout and will now apparently get another.

But the rest of the 200 Huffington Post employees are moving over to AOL with Huffington, who Armstrong hopes will be the company’s ace in the content hole going forward.

There are likely to be changes to come too at AOL, within weeks, especially in its content-side management and site staffs.

AOL provided some quotes in support of the deal from prominent Internet figures who know Huffington well.

“Arianna is one of the preeminent authors and editors of our time, and Tim has a remarkable track record of business success,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “Bringing them together creates tremendous potential for AOL.”

And Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said:

“Editorial vision and leadership are essential in order to transmute our shared cacophony of voices into a valuable dialogue. Arianna’s expertise, empathy, and entrepreneurial enthusiasm forms a kind of alchemy turning mere words and phrases into powerful expressions of humanity.”

Inter-Internet harmony: How sweet!

Here is the official press release, with all the details, but there is also an 8 am ET AOL conference call tomorrow:

AOL AGREES TO ACQUIRE THE HUFFINGTON POST

Acquisition Will Solidify AOL’s Strategy of Creating a Premier Content Network With Local, National and International Reach

Arianna Huffington To Lead Newly Formed The Huffington Post Media Group Which Will Integrate All Huffington Post and AOL Content, Including News, Tech, Women, Local, Multicultural, Entertainment, Video, Community, and More

The New Combined Media Group Will Reach 117 Million Americans and 270 Million Globally

Group Uniquely Positioned To Redefine the Future of Brand Advertising and Marketing For an Engaged and Influential Audience

New York, NY–February 7, 2011–AOL Inc. [NYSE:AOL] announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors*.

The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age–leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.

The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world**. Following the close of this transaction, AOL will accelerate its strategy to deliver a scaled and differentiated array of premium news, analysis, and entertainment produced by thousands of writers, editors, reporters, and videographers around the globe.

As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.

“The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO of AOL. “Together, our companies will embrace the digital future and become a digital destination that delivers unmatched experiences for both consumers and advertisers.”

Armstrong continued, “Arianna is a singularly passionate and dedicated champion of innovative journalistic engagement, and a master of the art of using new media to illuminate, entertain and enhance the national conversation. Arianna is a remarkable person and she will continue to create remarkable outcomes for the combined company.”

“This is truly a merger of visions and a perfect fit for us,” said Huffington. “The Huffington Post will continue on the same path we have been on for the last six years–though now at light speed–by combining with AOL. Our readers will still be able to come to the Huffington Post at the same URL, and find all the same content they’ve grown to love, plus a lot more–more local, more tech, more entertainment, more finance, and lots more video. We are fusing a legendary and powerful new media brand with a vibrant, innovative news organization, known for its distinctive voice, a highly engaged audience, an expertise in community-building, and a track record for demystifying the news and putting flesh and blood on the data while drawing our audience into the conversation.”

Huffington continued, “By uniting AOL and The Huffington Post, we are creating one of the largest destinations for smart content and community on the Internet. And we intend to keep making it better and better.”

Kenneth Lerer, The Huffington Post’s Co-Founder and Chairman, said, “The Huffington Post team has created a potent brand with the proven track record of knowing how to grow traffic, inform and entertain its readers and build a one-of-a-kind online community. Add that to the powerful scale and resources of AOL and you have the perfect combination for today and the future. Together these two companies will be a premier online content provider. From local citizen reporting through AOL’s Patch, to The Huffington Post’s national reporting on politics, business and culture, consumers will have access to everything they want whenever they want it.”

AOL has agreed to purchase The Huffington Post for $315 million, approximately $300 million of which will be paid in cash funded from cash on hand. The Huffington Post is privately owned by its two cofounders, as well as a group of investors. The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of government approvals. The boards of directors of each company and shareholders of The Huffington Post have approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the late first- or early second-quarter 2011.

The Huffington Post over-indexes on educated, affluent users, reaching the key decision makers in C-suites around the globe. The Huffington Post speaks to this influential audience via a host of prominent voices on its group blog. Among those who have blogged on The Huffington Post are: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, Diane Sawyer, Buzz Aldrin, Nora Ephron, Bill Maher, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Katie Couric, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Senator Russ Feingold, Senator Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Harry Shearer, Senator John Kerry, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Madonna, Lawrence Summers, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Craig Newmark, Alec Baldwin, Aaron Sorkin, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Russell Simmons, Sean Penn, Bill Gates, Norman Lear, Charlie Rose, Elizabeth Warren, Tavis Smiley, Sheryl Sandberg, George Clooney, and former President Bill Clinton. And the audience speaks back, generating four million comments a month***.

The Huffington Post’s affluent, influential audience, that is growing at a rate of 22 percent (December 2009 vs. December 2010)****, when combined with AOL’s massive scale, video offerings and local expertise, will represent an incredibly desirable demographic for a broad range of advertising partners across the board.

And here is Armstrong’s internal memo to the AOL staff:

AOLers,

We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet. We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world–The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet.

Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader–one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. Arianna and team have created a brand and a destination that focuses on the consumer experience. By combining The Huffington Post with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video offerings, local expertise and enormous reach, we will create a company that is laser-focused on serving our audiences across every platform imaginable–social, local, video, mobile and tablet.

The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus–80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.

The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content. In addition, Arianna Huffington is a world-renowned expert on women’s topics and issues, and has enabled The Huffington Post to grow rapidly by continually developing new audiences.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way.

The Huffington Post will join the family of AOL Brands that are destinations for an influencer audience, brands like TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, and Moviefone. Uniquely, The Huffington Post is the platform for influential people–the people that drive trends, commerce, politics, entertainment, news, and information. Adding this strategic platform to our already strong network of sites, including the AOL homepage, has the potential to make AOL the most influential company in the content space.

Arianna Huffington is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space and someone that is even more successful in building communities and relationships in every corner of the globe. The Huffington Post and Arianna have created a company that has partnered with the most successful and well-known leaders in all aspects of society that touch important topics to give consumers direct access to the most influential decision makers and community leaders.

This acquisition will create a high-quality and diverse digital ecosystem encompassing local, national and international news, politics, entertainment, technology, fashion, sports, health, personal finance, green, lifestyle, the arts and more. This deal will combine the amazing talent at AOL with the innovative and talented staff of The Huffington Post. Here are just a few high-level points around what this deal brings to market:

* Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117MM unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and ~270MM monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).

* The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet. It grew 22% last year–that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18% – and 15x as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).

* Both AOL and The Huffington Post count powerful, affluent users among their top loyal visitors, significantly over-indexing in $100K+ income users.

* AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.

* Between AOL’s innovative Project Devil ad unit, engaging users for 27 seconds longer than traditional display ads, and The Huffington Post’s highly-vocal community, with 4MM+ comments per month, we will marry attention-grabbing content and brand experiences for both advertisers and consumers.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a premier global/local syndication network at scale. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely, informative and entertaining way.

To maximize the strategic advantage of this great deal, we will be creating a new group at AOL called The Huffington Post Media Group. Within this group will be AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and our new friends at The Huffington Post. We will continue operating the towns structure, AOL.com and HuffingtonPost.com.

I’m thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will join AOL’s executive team as President and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. We have asked Jon Brod to lead the overall operational integration on the AOL side of the combined entities. Jon will lead the local group integration and work closely with David Eun and the teams in AOL Media. We will work quickly with The Huffington Post to create a combined organizational design to coincide with the deal closing. While we wait for the required regulatory reviews to be completed and the transaction to close before implementing the design, we will move very quickly to plan the details of the integration of the two companies. To this end, we will announce the new organizational structure as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we will continue creating great content and products for our consumers within the town structure and stay laser-focused on the aggressive goals we have set for our winter luge. We are on the right track and will continue our weekly operating cadence and town structure to drive successful results against our company goals.

Here’s a special message for all of you we taped to welcome The Huffington Post and Arianna to our AOL Family:

http://today.office.aol.com/company-news/2011/02/aol-agrees-buy-huffington-post

And of course we wanted to welcome Arianna to our “You’ve Got” video of the day–check her out on AOL.com.

We will be holding a company all hands meeting to address your questions related to today’s exciting news. We will video conference from our New York office on the 6th Floor at 9:30 AM ET and will be joined by Arianna Huffington and key executives from her organization. We will also be holding a call for our west coast offices at 2:00 PM ET and for our Patch offices at 2:45 PM ET. See below for meeting info (conference rooms will be sent out shortly).

AOL is playing to win…and The Huffington Post and AOL will occupy a unique place in the future of the Internet. Let’s go get it done.

–TA

(More full disclosure: As has been previously reported by MediaMemo, All Things Digital had the briefest and most preliminary of discussions with Armstrong about moving to AOL last year, while exploring several other options. All’s well that ended well: We stayed at Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp.)

A new $10 million micro-venture fund, led by former Yahoo top engineering exec Ash Patel–called Morado Ventures and funded by a group largely made up of ex-Yahoos–is about to launch, according to sources close to the situation.

Expected limited partners in Morado, which means “purple” in Spanish, include former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, former COO Dan Rosensweig and former advertising sales head Greg Coleman. Ex-Yahoo President Sue Decker is also considering investing, said sources.

Purple, of course, is Yahoo’s color.

Interestingly enough, the fund–which has not officially closed yet–is also likely to include Yahoo’s two founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, both of whom are still at the company.

Both will be limited partners and will not make investment decisions. In addition, Morado has no affiliation with Yahoo.

(Still, BoomTown would love to have been the fly in the room when Yang and Filo told current Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz about it!)

Patel will also be joined at Morado by Mike Marquez of investment advisory firm, Code Advisors, although he will also remain at Code.

Sources said the small fund, which is similar to an angel group, will focus on early-stage start-ups in the Internet consumer arena, as well as in the platform space.

Patel (pictured here)–a 14-year Yahoo veteran whose last job at the company was as EVP for Product Architecture & Strategy–certainly has experience in these areas.

He took a sabbatical from the company last November, but never really returned.

Sources said Patel has been doing some of his own investing since then, but was eager to involve himself with start-ups.

While ironic in many ways–the kinds of innovative companies that Morado will likely be investing in are just those that have put the slower-moving Yahoo in just the situation it finds itself in today–it’s a great idea for a fund run by longtime operating execs.

And while many execs from a variety of Silicon Valley companies have become VCs, angel investors and such, this gathering of former execs from the same company is definitely one to watch.

(Plus, BoomTown is guessing the parties will be fun too.)

I am sure I will be chatting with Patel in the future, but here is a video interview I did with him in late 2008 about the launch of some open and social networking initiatives at Yahoo (Former SVP Tapan Bhat, who had once reported to Patel, is also in the video):

That’s per Huffpo’s own numbers, served up by Google Analytics (GOOG). And as usual, outside auditors provide a different number. ComScore’s (SCOR) January numbers put the site at 26.4 million unique visitors (see breakdown at bottom of this post).

But no matter how you count it, there’s now a really, really big audience for a site the smart set derided as a vanity project for Arianna Huffington when it launched in 2005.

You may also recall predictions that Huffpo would wither after the 2008 elections, but that hasn’t happened either. So what’s driving the growth?

Verticals, says Huffington–the mini-Huffpos the site has been pumping out on a regular basis. The site’s technology and sports sections, for instance, didn’t exist six months ago. Now they account for 10 percent of Huffpo’s traffic, she says. (Did you know ultimate fighter Chuck Liddell has a nude workout tape?)

Other big hits: Comedy (up 58 percent in the last six months), style (37 percent), entertainment (25 percent).

Huffington was less boastful about the site’s attempts to roll out local sections. That started with Chicago in August 2008, and now includes Denver, Los Angeles and New York.

But she’s not sure where that will go next: “This year [we] have prioritized launching other sections, which has been a great decision,” she says. It’s possible that Huffpo will launch more local sites, or it may partner with other sites instead.

Huffington’s competitors and/or detractors would also want to point to the site’s team of technology wizards, which allow it to extract the maximum value out of a relatively small (100 full-time employees) staff. Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs.

But eyeballs are eyeballs. Next up: Turning them  into dollars. That’s up to sales boss Greg Coleman and his brigade of Yahoo (YHOO) veterans.

That’s the idea behind a brace of new sales guys, brought in by sales head Greg Coleman, who is himself a newish addition to the site.

The hires:

• Andy Wiedlin, formerly at News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, and Yahoo before that, will run West Coast sales.
• Phil Cara, formerly at AOL, and Yahoo before that, will run East Coast sales.
• Peter Cherukuri, the former publisher of Roll Call, will run sales in Washington, D.C.
• Brian Kaminsky, formerly at Reuters, and Yahoo prior to that, will run sales operations out of New York.

Note the connection for three of the four new guys? Not a coincidence.

Coleman was the longtime Yahoo (YHOO) sales head until he got pushed out in 2007. He resurfaced last year as head of AOL’s (AOL) sales group but left less than three months into the job when new CEO Tim Armstrong brought in his guy.

At the new gig, Coleman’s plan is to use his new/old team to convince advertisers to start spending significant money. The site was on track to do something in the $10 million range last year, but CEO Eric Hippeau wants to goose that number to $100 million in the next few years in order to justify the $37 million that investors have sunk into the company.

Coleman came to the site last fall when it already had a good traffic story to tell–comScore (SCOR) counted 6.8 million unique users in September, which is more than WSJ.com’s 6.7 million. And that story will get better very soon, as comScore rolls out its new “hybrid” measuring system. Coleman says the new numbers will push Huffpo above the 17 million mark.

His team still needs to battle the perception that Huffpo is an all-politics (and lefty, to boot) site, since advertisers are often leery about anything political.

Sure enough, as I’m typing this Monday night, the site’s front page is dominated by Washington coverage–a banner headline about the Republican Party’s opposition to something called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. And no matter what Coleman and his guys say, no one’s going to confuse the site with, say, Fox News.

Still, the site has long argued that it isn’t dominated by political coverage, and Coleman now says less than 25 percent of its traffic comes from that stuff. A heavy dose of entertainment/media coverage–did you know the dude from “300″ now has man boobs and a paunch?–helps make that claim plausible.

Will advertisers buy it? People who aren’t Greg Coleman tell me marketers were already warming to the site this year, a result of work done by the previous regime. And in large part due to interest from entertainment companies pushing new movies and TV shows.

But if Coleman and his employers want to hit their $100 million goal, they’ll need to do a lot more work. For more on Coleman’s strategy, check out his conversation with Kara Swisher from last fall.

The Web site said in AdAge that no advertisers have signed on yet and that it would help them figure out how to best inject their messages into relevant parts of the site. Greg Coleman, HuffPo’s president and a former Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL) exec, said a company seeking advertising around the World Series might tweet about baseball, for example.

“You cannot use the social engagement for the purposes of really hawking your products,” he told AdAge. “The advertiser is really put in a position where they need to add value to the conversation that’s taking place.”

The initiative is already generating discussion, not surprisingly, on Twitter, where some users wondered if the extra revenue would go toward compensating the site’s unpaid bloggers. “Losing respect for them, min by min,” Casey Rentz tweeted. Others were more sympathetic: “I have decided that sponsored tweets (a la the HuffPo) are okay, as long as they are clearly marked. I may be a brand tweeter one day,” Jill Elswick wrote.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

How to help marketers to better understand the site and, therefore, spur this significant monetization will be his main focus at the Huffington Post, said Greg Coleman to BoomTown in an interview over the weekend.

Coleman–a former Yahoo (YHOO) advertising exec, as well as one for Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL–was named president and chief revenue officer a month ago by Huffington Post’s new CEO, Eric Hippeau.

Hippeau, who was himself just appointed in June, is another well-known online media exec and has been a big investor and board member of the Huffington Post. (You can read a thorough interview by Staci Kramer with Hippeau on paidContent.)

“It’s important for advertisers to know how big we have gotten, while also highlighting this amazing audience of influencers we have gathered,” said Coleman, in his first media chitchat since taking on the job. “I think it is the beginning of a tipping point.”

Well, of course, Coleman would say that, as the guy looking to drum up interest among marketers in spending their money on the Huffington Post.

But stats seem to indicate that consumers are increasingly liking what the Huffington Post is creating, because it is starting to surpass some well-known media icons on the Web in traffic.

While more of this increase is going to be due to a socialization of the news–the Huffington Post has an aggressive deployment of Facebook Connect called HuffPost Social News–the growth is more about building a brand people trust and seek out.

According to recent reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online, for example, the site just became larger than several online brands of big media companies, such as the Washington Post (WPO), in terms of unique monthly visitors.

In its September report, Nielsen clocked the Huffington Post at 9.47 million uniques, up 26 percent, while the Post site was at 9.2 million–a drop of 30 percent.

According to the Nielsen, the Huffington Post is within spitting distance of USA Today’s Web site (9.9 million), a Gannett (GCI) property.

And, it is bigger than Hearst Newspapers Digital (7.9 million) and the BBC (7.2 million).

For September, comScore has the Huffington Post (at 6.83 million) besting the Post (6.77 million)–as well as WSJ.com (6.7 million), a unit of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS).

(The Wall Street Journal site, to be fair, makes a chunk of its revenue from subscription fees, rather than relying solely on advertising from traffic like the Huffington Post. And full disclosure: Dow Jones owns this site.)

In any case, big traffic is key for most news sites, and internal numbers from Google (GOOG) Analytics that Huffington Post execs cite are higher, as is typical for most sites, pegging traffic at about 27 million monthly uniques with more than two million reader comments per month.

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging icon Arianna Huffington attributes the recent boost in traffic to the site’s proclivity to “start conversations” that interest readers, such as her recent suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should resign.

“We are aiming to go beyond just facts, to create a narrative,” said Huffington, who thinks the speed of news helps attract visitors to the site. “We think bringing journalism to a new level is exactly what people are looking for.”

Perhaps. But, even if traffic increases continue to bear her theories out, she and others have said that the Huffington Post still has not been regularly profitable despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

While the site is aiming to invest rather than focus too hard on showing profits, Coleman said he would like to make revenue seven times larger in the next years, building on the performance of the site to vaunt past old media giants online.

“This kind of thing is a milestone for the marketing community,” he said. “Our goal is to be the top Internet newspaper, and this points out that we are on our way.”

To do that, he will have to spend some of the $37 million in funding that the Huffington Post has raised from venture investors.

While the edit side is using the money to expand the number of news categories, Coleman said his focus will be on building a higher caliber team of sales and marketing execs with deeper relationships to big clients.

“Unlike selling an auto page on Yahoo (YHOO), our site has a more complex sales process that takes some time for people to understand,” said Coleman. “But once they get it, it should be an easier sale.”

Until then, check out the video of the entire interview I did at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Huffington and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth in which they talk about the future of journalism and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091020/as-traffic-booms-is-huffpo-ready-to-make-some-real-dough/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090916/former-yahoo-and-aol-ad-exec-coleman-poised-to-join-the-huffington-post-as-president/ http://allthingsd.com/20090916/former-yahoo-and-aol-ad-exec-coleman-poised-to-join-the-huffington-post-as-president/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:40:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18441

In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman (pictured here), who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

And it is not clear what the role of current Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith will be going forward.

The Coleman hiring is most likely the work of Hippeau, who has known him from Coleman’s days as head of ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO). Hippeau has been on the board of the Internet giant for many years.

Hippeau was also a key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

He has also been a director on its small board, which also includes co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer, as well as Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, which is headquartered in New York.

The money will be used to expand the site into the local arena, investigative news, and verticals such as tech, a section set to debut Sept. 21.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Presumably, goosing that revenue is what Coleman is being pegged to help do–and he certainly has a lot of online advertising experience, having made stops at a lot of Internet companies in the past few years.

He was head of advertising sales at Yahoo for seven years, after another long stint at Reader’s Digest. Yahoo’s ad business grew strongly under him.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

He was soon running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

He then headed to AOL in February to run its Platform-A division.

But when new management was suddenly put in place by Time Warner (TWX) in the spring, Coleman left after only a few months on the job.

After taking the summer off, several sources said, he has recently been looking at a variety of jobs.

That included MySpace, where former Yahoo colleague Wenda Harris Millard–now with Media Link–was hired recently as an outside consultant to help the News Corp. (NWS) social networking site rejigger its ad business.

The Huffington Post spokesman declined to comment when BoomTown inquired about Coleman’s hiring.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090916/former-yahoo-and-aol-ad-exec-coleman-poised-to-join-the-huffington-post-as-president/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090908/digital-management-musical-chairs-the-tooth-free-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20090908/digital-management-musical-chairs-the-tooth-free-edition/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:30:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18208

Brad Garlinghouse’s appointment to a new job at AOL today as its new communications czar is yet another sign of an interesting trend for those keeping score of the comings and goings of top Internet execs.

Garlinghouse came to the Time Warner (TWX) online unit after a year-long break, preceded by six years at Yahoo (YHOO).

As anyone who watches the digital space knows by now, this kind of management musical chairs is common and never-ending.

In fact, borrowing a quote by IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) CEO and chairman Barry Diller from an onstage interview I did with him at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference and switching out Hollywood for Silicon Valley: “[It] is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth.”

But, given all the movement of late, this insider seat-switching seems more frantic than ever, as allegiances shift, competitors become friends and colleagues become rivals faster than you can tweet.

When he left Yahoo last summer, in fact, the digital chatter was that Garlinghouse would take a job either as a venture capitalist (he had been one once) or helming a start-up (that too, at Dialpad.com).

In fact, sources said, Garlinghouse had been considering two mobile gigs, but opted for helping to try to overhaul a troubled Web giant.

Fixing messes was the impetus of Owen Van Natta, who left a top job at social networking giant Facebook in early 2008 and by the end of the year, headed over to run Project Playlist, a controversial online music-sharing service.

But then he had hightailed it by spring to try his hand at reviving MySpace, as its CEO.

His boss, News Corp. (NWS) digital head Jon Miller, did the same, getting the hook (unfairly to my mind) at AOL several years ago and then creating an investment firm with former MySpace head Ross Levinsohn.

The pair considered being part of a bid to oust Yahoo management in 2008.

Miller’s freedom lasted only until he got an offer that he presumably could not refuse from News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch recently. (Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

The list goes on, chock full of ex-Yahoos, in fact.

Its one-time COO, Dan Rosensweig, left the company in 2006, for example, and joined the well-known private-equity firm, Quadrangle Group.

But, soon enough, he was scooped up by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) to run its Guitar Hero division.

Yahoo Network head Jeff Weiner also departed from the Internet giant, in mid-2008, for a stint at two VC firms.

He landed at LinkedIn, the business-networking service where he was named CEO in late June.

Greg Coleman ran Yahoo ad sales until mid-2007 before taking a job at AOL earlier this year, which he lost after it got new management soon after.

At Yahoo, Coleman sparked with former advertising sales head Wenda Harris Millard, whom he ousted. She went onto Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) and left there this spring for the Media Link consultancy.

Presto! She is now helping MySpace’s Van Natta fix the social networking site’s ad business.

Current Yahoo U.S. advertising head Joanne Bradford actually came from Microsoft last summer, via her own short visit to the troubled ad start-up SpotRunner.

Former Yahoo search techie Qi Lu now runs digital for Microsoft (MSFT), along with a big gang of ex-Yahoo techies he has recruited.

And Scott Moore is even better at the switcheroo. He was at Microsoft running MSN U.S. content, switched to Yahoo as its media poobah, left last year to consider a start-up and then headed back to Microsoft as head of U.S. content this year.

But former Google (GOOG) execs have also been busy shuttling hither and yon, mostly to innovative start-ups.

Of course, many find refuge at Facebook (COO Sheryl Sandberg, PR major domo Elliot Schrage and many more) and Twitter (GC Alexander Macgillivray and COO Dick Costolo).

Recent departures–such as Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who landed at Accel Partners for now–are also likely to find new homes soon enough.

And, of course, there’s always Garlinghouse’s new boss, former Google ad head Tim Armstrong, who took over at AOL earlier this year.

We’ll skip former Joost CEO and former Cisco (CSCO) exec Mike Volpi (who is now a VC); former Netscape Communications/short-term VC/ex-banker/current-for-now CBS (CBS) digital head Quincy Smith; and Joanna Shields, who has worked at Real Networks (RNWK), Google and Bebo (which was bought by AOL)–for now.

Because, around and around and around it always goes, as you can see in this funny video below, which I posted previously:

[Musical Chair designed by Jacob Mathew.]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090908/digital-management-musical-chairs-the-tooth-free-edition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090827/aol-still-shaking-up-staff-hires-new-cfo-artie-minson/ http://allthingsd.com/20090827/aol-still-shaking-up-staff-hires-new-cfo-artie-minson/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:47:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10396 Newish AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hasn’t gone on a massive firing binge. But he’s still shaking up the ranks at the Time Warner (TWX) unit. Today, for instance, he is installing a new chief financial officer: Artie Minson, the deputy CFO at sister company Time Warner Cable (TWC). Minson replaces Nisha Kumar, who held the spot for two years.

Minson is actually rejoining AOL–he was previously an SVP in its finance department and left to join Time Warner Cable prior to its own spinoff from Time Warner.

It’s one of a series of top-level moves Armstrong has made since leaving Google (GOOG) to run the Internet pioneer, now set to be spun off by its parent company later this year (if it isn’t sold first). He brought in Jeff Levick, another Google vet, to replace Greg Coleman as sales boss. And he purchased Patch Media, the local media company he had invested in, installing its CEO as the head of a newly created AOL venture arm. Former Bebo boss Joanna Shields is also out the door.

Here’s the release:

AOL NAMES ARTHUR MINSON AS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
Time Warner Cable Deputy CFO Rejoins AOL; Brings Critical Expertise from Time Warner Cable’s Successful Transition to Independent Public Company
New York, NY, August 27, 2009–AOL today named Arthur Minson as the company’s new Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Minson joins AOL from Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), where he has served as Executive Vice President and Deputy CFO and helped manage that company’s separation from Time Warner. Prior to his role at Time Warner Cable, Minson led AOL’s Corporate Finance and Development activities. ??”We’re delighted to have Artie back at AOL as we continue our transition to an independent public company,” said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. “Artie’s strong financial acumen, operating experience, and deep understanding of our company and the Internet and content industries make him a perfect fit for AOL. He’s also a public company veteran who helped handle Time Warner Cable’s transition to a public company. Artie will hit the ground running and be a tremendous asset to AOL as we focus on driving growth, value and innovation.” ?”This is a wonderful opportunity to rejoin AOL at one of the most important and exciting times in this great company’s history,” said Minson. “AOL has an incredible collection of assets, and Tim has set the company on the right strategic course. I look forward to working with Tim and the entire AOL organization to help maximize the financial and operating performance of these assets and their value for investors.” ?In his new role, Minson will oversee the Company’s financial functions including accounting, financial planning and analysis, tax, treasury, human resources, mergers and acquisitions, and internal audit. Minson will be headquartered in New York City and will begin at AOL on September 8, 2009.? ?Minson previously served as Executive Vice President and Deputy Chief Financial Officer at Time Warner Cable, overseeing the company’s accounting, financial planning and analysis, operations finance, corporate services, and internal audit functions. He also worked closely with TWC’s treasury and IR departments, as well as senior management, to craft company strategy in those areas.
Minson joined Time Warner Cable in 2006 in connection with its planned IPO. Prior to that, Minson was Senior Vice President, Corporate Finance and Development at AOL, where he was responsible for financial planning and analysis, mergers and acquisitions and corporate financial administration. He’s also held senior finance positions at Rainbow Media Holdings, Inc. and Time Warner Inc. Minson, a CPA, began his career in the Audit Practice of Ernst and Young as one of Time Warner’s principal outside auditors. He holds a BSBA in Accounting from Georgetown University and an MBA with a concentration in Finance from Columbia Business School.? ?On May 28, 2009, Time Warner Inc. announced that its Board of Directors had authorized management to proceed with plans for the complete legal and structural separation of AOL from Time Warner. Following the proposed transaction, AOL would be an independent, publicly traded company. Time Warner has indicated that it aims to complete the proposed transaction around the end of this year. ??Minson is replacing Nisha Kumar, who left the company earlier this summer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090827/aol-still-shaking-up-staff-hires-new-cfo-artie-minson/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090701/tim-armstrongs-100-day-vision-quest-nearing-end-party-in-dulles-and-then-what/ http://allthingsd.com/20090701/tim-armstrongs-100-day-vision-quest-nearing-end-party-in-dulles-and-then-what/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:28:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15297

Back on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”

It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.

More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:

“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”

BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.

So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.

What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.

His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the world-wide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.

There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:

“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”

Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles; New York; Baltimore; San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Toronto, Lancaster, Pa.; Denver; Hamburg; London; Paris; Bangalore; Dublin and, this week, Tel Aviv.

But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.

During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Shields, and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spinoff of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).

It will be interesting to see what comes next–after the 100-day gathering in Dulles, which should come sometime after Armstrong’s July 15 deadline, of course.

Party on, Tim.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090701/tim-armstrongs-100-day-vision-quest-nearing-end-party-in-dulles-and-then-what/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090619/viral-video-watch-the-bouncing-web-execs-play-digital-musical-chairs/ http://allthingsd.com/20090619/viral-video-watch-the-bouncing-web-execs-play-digital-musical-chairs/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:32:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14684

Here’s a very funny video, called “Digital Media Musical Chairs,” from a Wall Street type who goes by the codename L. McDuff.

(He also did “Mad Avenue Blues” and two years of “Wall Street Meltdown,” which is also embedded below.)

It’s about the many switcheroos in recent years among the execs at the big Web outfits like Google (GOOG), Time Warner (TWX) unit AOL, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT).

And when you look at it from a “Hollywood Squares” point of view–oh, how I desperately miss Paul Lynde–it’s kind of is amazing to realize that there are only about a dozen Internet execs moving in and out of the various jobs.

Some of the faces in the video include Greg Coleman (Yahoo/AOL), Sheryl Sandberg (Google/Facebook), Tim Armstrong (Google/AOL) and Joanne Bradford (Microsoft/Yahoo). It’s a wonder the video leaves out Scott Moore (Microsoft/Yahoo/Microsoft).

Here are the videos:

Digital Media Musical Chairs:

Mad Avenue Blues:

Wall Street Meltdown:

Wall Street Meltdown–Redux:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090619/viral-video-watch-the-bouncing-web-execs-play-digital-musical-chairs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090528/aol-spin-off-approved-last-night-by-time-warner-board-heres-the-inside-details-not-in-the-press-release/ http://allthingsd.com/20090528/aol-spin-off-approved-last-night-by-time-warner-board-heres-the-inside-details-not-in-the-press-release/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 12:23:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13914

While there were reports that the Time Warner board was meeting today to approve the spinoff of its AOL online unit, it actually gave the move an “enthusiastic endorsement” last night, according to sources.

Time Warner (TWX) just put out the press release about the move this morning, which has been long expected since former top Google (GOOG) advertising exec Tim Armstrong was named CEO of the long troubled AOL.

“Following the proposed transaction, AOL would be an independent, publicly traded company,” said the release, which gave few details of the shape of the new company.

But, several sources with knowledge of the situation said Armstrong is set to make massive changes to the structure of AOL, sweeping aside its current set-up almost completely.

That includes keeping the access business, which many thought would be sold off, and putting many of the companies it has recently acquired–including its pricey Bebo social networking site–in a separate ventures unit, which will try to attract outside investment.

The strategy will focus AOL on several key areas, including media, “scaled” advertising and communications.

Time Warner owns 95 percent of AOL, and Google holds the remaining five percent, but Time Warner said it would buy back that stake in the third quarter of 2009 as part of the transaction.

“Accordingly, once the proposed separation is completed, Time Warner shareholders will own all of the outstanding interests in AOL,” said the release. “The proposed transaction will be structured as tax-free to Time Warner stockholders.”

Armstrong is at the midpoint of a 100-day review of AOL, which has seen its profits and revenues drop in recent years.

That has meant a hard look at the structure put in place by his predecessors, former CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant.

They had cleaved AOL into three parts: the MediaGlow content studio; People Networks, which includes Bebo, as well as AOL’s communications assets like AIM instant-messengering service; and its Platform-A advertising unit.

Each has had its own president, and has been operated more independently.

That is effectively over, said sources, as had been signaled by the recent departures of People Networks head Joanna Shields and Platform-A head Greg Coleman.

Now Bebo, as well as start-ups AOL has bought recently such as the Userplane social-media apps unit and its Truveo video search service, will be “relocated” into AOL Ventures.

Each will operate on its own, and AOL will try to get venture capitalists to invest in them.

Armstrong has also decided to stress the AOL brand again, after years of creating a variety of new ones, and try to revive its other well-known brands, such as AIM and ICQ.

All the other parts of AOL will be integrated more tightly together, although the MediaGlow content business will get additional investment and still be run by Bill Wilson.

In addition, sources said it was unlikely AOL would make any big acquisitions after it spins out. Instead, it will focus on making key partnerships with a variety of companies.

Here’s the official press release:

Time Warner Inc. Announces Plan to Separate AOL
May 28, 2009

NEW YORK – Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized management to proceed with plans for the complete legal and structural separation of AOL from Time Warner. Following the proposed transaction, AOL would be an independent, publicly traded company.

Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes said: “We believe that a separation will be the best outcome for both Time Warner and AOL. The separation will be another critical step in the reshaping of Time Warner that we started at the beginning of last year, enabling us to focus to an even greater degree on our core content businesses. The separation will also provide both companies with greater operational and strategic flexibility. We believe AOL will then have a better opportunity to achieve its full potential as a leading independent Internet company.”

After the proposed separation is complete, AOL will compete as a standalone company–focused on growing its Web brands and services, which currently reach more than 107 million domestic unique visitors a month, as well as its advertising business, which operates the leading online display network that reaches more than 91% of the domestic online audience. AOL will also continue to operate one of the largest Internet access subscription services in the U.S.

AOL Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong said: “This will be a great opportunity for AOL, our employees and our partners. Becoming a standalone public company positions AOL to strengthen its core businesses, deliver new and innovative products and services, and enhance our strategic options. We play in a very competitive landscape and will be using our new status to retain and attract top talent. Although we have a tremendous amount of work to do, we have a global brand, a committed team of people, and a passion for the future of the Web.”

Today, Time Warner owns 95% of AOL, and Google holds the remaining 5%. As part of a prior arrangement, Time Warner expects to purchase Google’s 5% stake in AOL in the third quarter of 2009. After repurchasing this stake, Time Warner will own 100% of AOL. Accordingly, once the proposed separation is completed, Time Warner shareholders will own all of the outstanding interests in AOL.

The proposed transaction will be structured as tax-free to Time Warner stockholders. The transaction is contingent on the satisfaction of a number of conditions, including completion of the review process by the Securities and Exchange Commission of required filings under applicable securities regulations and the final approval of transaction terms by Time Warner’s Board of Directors. Time Warner aims to complete the proposed transaction around the end of the year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090528/aol-spin-off-approved-last-night-by-time-warner-board-heres-the-inside-details-not-in-the-press-release/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090514/more-tim-armstrong-fallout-execs-leaving-google-aol/ http://allthingsd.com/20090514/more-tim-armstrong-fallout-execs-leaving-google-aol/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 20:30:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7382 More ripple effects from Tim Armstrong’s departure from Google to run AOL for Time Warner (TWX): Tom Phillips, Google’s director of search and analytics, is out.

No word on whether he has a new job lined up, but it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see him land at AOL. Armstrong has already brought over former Googler Jeff Levick to replace Greg Coleman as head of ad sales, and the chatter is that he’ll bring over more Google (GOOG) vets before he’s done making over his team. And Phillips, I’m told by multiple sources, “was a Tim guy.”

UPDATE: AOL officials say there are no plans to bring Phillips on board.

Meanwhile, Armstrong/Levick have been overhauling their new sales team. Earlier this week they let go of 17 people, primarily in sales support. But those cuts had actually been planned by Coleman, who wanted to reallocate resources away from sales support and expand his sales team.

Phillips’s departure comes after multiple high-level executives have left Google’s sales team, which is now overseen by Nikesh Arora and run day-to-day by Dennis Woodside. No comment from the Google PR team.

His resume is a bit different from your typical Googler’s: For one thing, he graduated from Harvard in the 1970s. He put in time at Spy magazine and Disney’s (DIS) Web 1.0 team and then ran Dejanews.com, selling what was left of that company to Google after the first bubble popped. At Google, Phillips ran the company’s now-shuttered print advertising program and helped oversee integration of Doubleclick.

[Image credit: Hitchster]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090514/more-tim-armstrong-fallout-execs-leaving-google-aol/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090502/weekend-update-50309-special-musical-chairs-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20090502/weekend-update-50309-special-musical-chairs-edition/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 07:00:44 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16790 If there was an over-arching theme for this week at All Things D, it would have to be musical chairs.

Brand new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta started things off Monday with his first day on the job. He was joined by new COO and former AOL exec Mike Jones and new chief product officer and former Sling Media exec Jason Hirschhorn. Down in Los Angeles at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, Boomtown ran smack into Huff Post mastermind Arianna Huffington, who extolled the virtues and abilities of new managing editor Jai Singh, former editor-in-chief of CNET Networks. At AOL, in preparation for spinning off the Time Warner (TWX) Online unit, new CEO Tim Armstrong began appointing new senior execs and spinning off existing ones. Platform-A president and former Yahoo (YHOO) sales exec Greg Coleman, who joined the AOL team in February, is leaving the company, to be replaced by Jeff Levick, who is leaving Google (GOOG)–where he had a close relationship with Armstrong. CFO Nisha Kumar is also leaving AOL, and a search is underway for her replacement. MediaMemo has more on Time Warner’s decision to spin off AOL. A number of Flickr engineers were laid off Wednesday, but Chief Architect Cal Henderson has left the company of his own accord and is working on a stealth start-up with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Last, but not least, one of the voices covering the digital scene has found a new gig. Owen Thomas, self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley,” is leaving Valleywag to head up GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new “Bay Area” Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.” He’ll be replaced by fresh-faced Ryan Tate, recently the night editor for Gawker. Both reporters talked to BoomTown on Friday about the changes.

MediaMemo wrote on Monday about Condé Nast shutting down Portfolio–both the print magazine and the accompanying Web site. On a cautionary note, MM outlined the reasons why Portfolio’s business magazine peers should not celebrate the loss of a competitor, even (or especially) during tough economic times. Is the meteoric ascension of Twitter flattening out? According to a Nielsen Online study, 60 percent of Twitter’s users leave after a month. This was met with a lot of skepticism so Nielsen ran the numbers again with the same results–and this time it’s sticking with them. MediaMemo also had an explanation for why the long-awaited deal between Disney (DIS) and Hulu took months and months and millions of dollars to finally come together. Digital Daily had more on that story.

Digital Daily also had more info on the ever-evolving Palm (PALM) Pre story. First, a rumor that Palm plans to launch the handset on June 7–which would be crazy, given the fact that June 8 is both the first day of Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference and the day that those in the know expect the next-generation iPhone to drop. Then, there’s an assertion by Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar based on supply chain research that Palm has greatly reduced its production numbers. Time will have to tell, though, because Palm certainly isn’t talking yet. Of course, things could be worse. Dell (DELL) hasn’t even solidified plans for its rumored smartphone, and already, no one really cares.

Dell’s new Adamo laptop and Studio One 19 desktop aren’t causing much excitement either. In this week’s Personal Technology column, Walt Mossberg reports that although both machines look good and function well, neither is groundbreaking. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered readers’ questions about improving performance on a PC, using peripheral devices with an iPhone and installing Apple’s OS X on a Windows machine. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret tested three apps from the iTunes App Store that make it possible for the iPod touch to function like an iPhone.

More next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090502/weekend-update-50309-special-musical-chairs-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090430/time-for-aolers-to-meet-their-new-sales-boss-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20090430/time-for-aolers-to-meet-their-new-sales-boss-again/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:12:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6852

Kara Swisher broke the story last night, but for the record, here’s the AOL press release announcing the Time Warner unit’s umpteenth new sales boss. Meet Jeff Levick, a Google (GOOG) vet who replaces Yahoo (YHOO) vet Greg Coleman, who just started in February.

Coleman’s departure won’t come as a shock to many online ad executives, who were predicting he’d leave as soon as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong started on April 7, if not sooner.

Then again, Armstrong never asked Coleman to slow down or reconsider the reorg of the sales group that he’d been undertaking on his own. Now it’s unclear whether he wants his former colleague to follow Coleman’s lead or blow every thing up yet again.

Presumably this will all be cleared up before Time Warner (TWX) spins off the Internet company.

JEFF LEVICK NAMED HEAD OF AOL GLOBAL ADVERTISING AND STRATEGY

New York, NY – April 30, 2009 – AOL announced that Jeff Levick will join the company as President, Global Advertising and Strategy. In this new and expanded role, Levick will be responsible for Platform-A, AOL’s advertising business, as well as developing global revenue strategies. Levick comes to AOL from Google, where he was most recently VP of Industry Development and Marketing, The Americas. He will report directly to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.

“Our goal at AOL is to create great content and products, as well as make our advertising offerings the best in the industry for marketers and we are putting together the strategy to achieve that. I’m delighted that Jeff will be coming on board to lead this effort,” Armstrong said. “I’ve worked with Jeff for more than seven years at Google, and he is absolutely the right person to drive growth in our premium ad sales, dramatically scale our Advertising.com business, and further develop AOL’s research initiatives and consumer insights.”

“This is a perfect time to join AOL and I firmly believe that AOL’s best days are ahead of it,” said Levick. “The company has one of the largest and most engaged audiences on the Web, some of the best advertising technology in the business, and a powerful third-party network. There is great opportunity here for us to capture.”

As a result of this change, Greg Coleman will be leaving Platform-A, where he has served as President since early February 2009.

“In only a short time, Greg made a strong imprint on Platform-A’s sales organization – reorganizing and refocusing the team,” said Armstrong. “I appreciate his efforts and know that they will contribute to the work that lies ahead with Platform-A.”

Levick will officially join AOL in the coming weeks. At Google, Levick was responsible for business marketing activities for the Americas as well as sales development and strategy for all of the vertical industries covered by Google’s Americas sales organization. Levick joined Google in 2001 and has held various executive management positions in the company’s advertising sales organization in both North America and Europe.

Prior to joining Google, Levick served as a corporate attorney with a specialty in mergers and acquisitions at the international law firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman, and held roles at various online ventures in Chicago. He currently serves on the board of directors of Helium.com, the advisory board of the College of Communications at DePaul University and as an advisory board member of the global trade organization Search Engine Strategies (SES). Levick holds a J.D. from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where he graduated cum laude.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090430/time-for-aolers-to-meet-their-new-sales-boss-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090429/exclusive-platform-a-head-coleman-out-at-aol-as-well-as-cfo-and-more-to-come/ http://allthingsd.com/20090429/exclusive-platform-a-head-coleman-out-at-aol-as-well-as-cfo-and-more-to-come/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:23:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12977

[UPDATE: AOL confirmed our story below about Coleman's departure and Levick's appointment. See below.]

Platform-A President Greg Coleman–the former Yahoo advertising sales exec who came to AOL only three months ago–is leaving the company, sources said, as new CEO Tim Armstrong remakes his top staff in preparation to spin off the Time Warner (TWX) online unit.

Coleman was brought to AOL by former CEO Randy Falco in February, replacing Lynda Clarizio. But Falco was ousted two weeks after Coleman got there.

Armstrong, sources said, announced the moves to staff tonight, right after he told Coleman about his decision late today.

Coleman will be replaced by a Google ad exec, Jeff Levick, sources said, who had a close relationship with Armstrong when they were both working at Google (GOOG).

AOL said in a press release that Levick would become “President, Global Advertising and Strategy, a new and expanded role, in which he would be “responsible for Platform-A, AOL’s advertising business, as well as developing global revenue strategies.”

Levick will be the third major Google advertising exec to leave the company recently, after Armstrong himself and today’s departure of former DoubleClick boss David Rosenblatt.

Levick (pictured here) was a VP of industry development & marketing, the Americas. He has been at Google since 2001.

Also out: CFO Nisha Kumar, who came to AOL in early 2007 from Time Warner. She was told of the decision earlier, and there has been a search on for her replacement.

It is a time of much change at AOL. Yesterday, Time Warner reiterated its intent to spin off AOL in a regulatory filing, and to buy back the five percent stake Google owns.

Time Warner also had to deliver bad news about AOL’s disappearing ad revenue today in its quarterly earnings report. It was down 20 percent.

Its ad business has not been helped by the fact that AOL has seen a number of Platform-A heads roll over the last two years.

Coleman is an experienced online ad exec, who was at Yahoo (YHOO) for seven years, responsible for all advertising revenue worldwide. He came to Yahoo from Reader’s Digest.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

But Yahoo’s ad business did grow strongly under him and former Yahoo ad exec Wenda Millard. She was also pushed out of Yahoo and just left her job as co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Before AOL, Coleman had been running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

While at AOL a short time, Coleman had busied himself reshuffling the staff there in several moves.

He has a three-year contract, sources said, which AOL will presumably have to pay out on.

Here is the official AOL press release:

JEFF LEVICK NAMED HEAD OF AOL GLOBAL ADVERTISING AND STRATEGY

New York, NY–April 30, 2009–AOL announced that Jeff Levick will join the company as President, Global Advertising and Strategy. In this new and expanded role, Levick will be responsible for Platform-A, AOL’s advertising business, as well as developing global revenue strategies. Levick comes to AOL from Google, where he was most recently VP of Industry Development and Marketing, The Americas. He will report directly to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.

“Our goal at AOL is to create great content and products, as well as make our advertising offerings the best in the industry for marketers and we are putting together the strategy to achieve that. I’m delighted that Jeff will be coming on board to lead this effort,” Armstrong said. “I’ve worked with Jeff for more than seven years at Google, and he is absolutely the right person to drive growth in our premium ad sales, dramatically scale our Advertising.com business, and further develop AOL’s research initiatives and consumer insights.”

“This is a perfect time to join AOL and I firmly believe that AOL’s best days are ahead of it,” said Levick. “The company has one of the largest and most engaged audiences on the Web, some of the best advertising technology in the business, and a powerful third-party network. There is great opportunity here for us to capture.”

As a result of this change, Greg Coleman will be leaving Platform-A, where he has served as President since early February 2009.

“In only a short time, Greg made a strong imprint on Platform-A’s sales organization–reorganizing and refocusing the team,” said Armstrong. “I appreciate his efforts and know that they will contribute to the work that lies ahead with Platform-A.”

Levick will officially join AOL in the coming weeks. At Google, Levick was responsible for business marketing activities for the Americas as well as sales development and strategy for all of the vertical industries covered by Google’s Americas sales organization. Levick joined Google in 2001 and has held various executive management positions in the company’s advertising sales organization in both North America and Europe.

Prior to joining Google, Levick served as a corporate attorney with a specialty in mergers and acquisitions at the international law firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman, and held roles at various online ventures in Chicago. He currently serves on the board of directors of Helium.com, the advisory board of the College of Communications at DePaul University and as an advisory board member of the global trade organization Search Engine Strategies (SES). Levick holds a J.D. from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where he graduated cum laude.

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