Back at the beginning of 2012, very few people would have picked AOL as the hottest Internet stock of the year.

And yet with only four trading days left, the New York-based portal is up 99.8 percent for the year, which is more than double the 49.4 percent rise in Amazon’s shares for the year to date and slightly less than four times more than Apple’s 28.4 percent.

I included AOL — which got its big lift via a series of deft financial transactions and other rejiggering of the business by CEO Tim Armstrong — in a group of 10 Web stocks, most of which saw decent rises since January 3, 2012.

After AOL and Apple, Netflix saw a 30.2 percent rise, followed by a 21.8 gain by Yahoo, which has only recently risen due to increased investor confidence in new CEO Marissa Mayer.

In contrast, Google — one of the Internet’s most powerful players — only managed a 9.8 percent increase, which was still about double Microsoft’s at a 4.2 percent bump.

That’s a whole lot better than the trio of laggards that tanked in 2012. The best of the worst has been Facebook, which is down just 29 percent. That’s a lot better than earlier this year, mostly due to increased investor confidence about its mobile prospects.

But nothing has been able to lift either Zynga (down 75.2 percent) or Groupon (down 77.6 percent) from the stock doldrums they have been caught in since their IPOs.

It’s the mirror image to AOL’s performance — a situation which could well change. After all, AOL dropped from $23.78 to $15.10 in 2011.

Here’s a pretty comparison chart to look at:

“It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players.

They include, in part: Lerer Venture’s Ken Lerer (who organized the effort); SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, adviser Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

In addition, there is a large-scale social media effort under way for Demand a Plan, which signee and venture capitalist Fred Wilson likens on his blog to other Internet-wide campaigns.

“Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful,” he wrote.

Here’s the ad itself:

They like her, they really like her.

Wall Street, that is, in regards to new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, assigning the former Google exec a clear premium.

And whether it is deserved or not yet from a pure performance perspective — we actually won’t know for several quarters ahead — the shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the past three months have gone up 22 percent. The rise has taken place pretty much on the promise that she will finally be the one to deliver what no other Yahoo leader has done.

And that is, besides making the company relevant and innovative again: Getting Yahoo’s stock past $20 a share again.

That’s within striking distance now. Shares are at $18.40 today, close to an all-time high for the year. The recent rise certainly isn’t taking into account the results of the recent lackluster third quarter, which continued to show the worrisome downward trends — even though partial asset sales of the company’s Chinese Alibaba stake successfully masked the problems — in growth, engagement and overall profitability.

But Mayer’s confident I’ve-got-this tones on the earnings call itself — especially in pushing a mobile strategy that has not been put in place as yet in any substantive way — won over Wall Street investors, who apparently like how she sounds and, thus, are intrigued with what she might do.

While this kind of perceptual game will only get Yahoo so far, moving out of the teens in share price would be an important benchmark for the company.

The stock was last at that level in August of 2008. At the time, in fact, $20 a share was considered very disappointing, taking place after Microsoft dropped its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo a few months earlier. Indeed, $20 was a big comedown from when Yahoo shares were above $43 in 2006.

The lowest price Yahoo shares got in recent years were $9.39 in November of 2008, just before then CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down.

Now the stock is close to double that sad trough, fueled in part by some cosmetic moves to improve culture by Mayer — including free food, smartphones and a promise to end the slow-moving decision-making at Yahoo.

There has also been a start of the promised multi-billion-dollar stock buybacks by the company, although Yahoo has been cagey about how and when it is purchasing. Also helping, more recently, is that several big hedge funds are buying into the story of hope.

Following in the footsteps of successful activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, who is now on the board and is a major Yahoo investor, others like him have now joined in the party in a bigger way. That includes David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital and Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management.

The thoughtful Einhorn, who is a friend of Loeb’s, has been in and out of the stock before, buying it on hopes that now ousted CEO Carol Bartz would be Yahoo’s savior and selling it soon after it was clear she might not be. He came back in February with three million shares, sold them in May, but now has upped his stake to just over five million more under Mayer’s regime.

More substantively, Tiger’s Coleman has grabbed 25 million shares (interestingly, he’s also upped his stakes in Groupon and Facebook).

Obviously, they must believe Yahoo is set to move upward, which all depends on Mayer. She’s made one critical stock misstep early in her tenure, by announcing that she was considering keeping the huge cash windfall from its sale of Alibaba stock and not giving it back to shareholders in some form.

That dropped Yahoo’s shares to under $15, but Mayer walked back that mistake and the stock has been climbing since.

For the year to date, it’s up almost 14 percent — a nice rise — although that pales in comparison to Apple’s 39 percent rise, Amazon’s 37 percent rise and, most of all, AOL’s 136 percent leap.

The comparison to the massive stock run that AOL has had, after CEO Tim Armstrong — also a former Googler — cut costs, focused units, sold patents and bought back stock, is often made. It’s perhaps apt, but arguably Yahoo has much better and fixable assets than AOL.

More to the point, Yahoo’s price-to-earnings ratio remains unusually low — it’s 5.6, compared to the S&P’s 14.2 average — which means that the entire business is severely undervalued by Wall Street.

It is if Mayer can create real value by actually staging the comeback she is already getting credit for accomplishing. She certainly has a lot of levers to improve results, from the stock buyback to finally making a deal to sell its multi-billion-dollar stake in Yahoo! Japan to making expense cuts to buying some innovative small start-ups to creating products that aren’t, well, lame.

Most importantly, Mayer has to stop the decimation of Yahoo’s once mighty advertising business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, as well as improve its search monetization by rejiggering its heretofore dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft. (But, as I wrote earlier this week, she will not be making new search engines with Facebook.)

A gander at this chart of Yahoo’s declining quarterly revenue should give you a good visual of the problem with the core business:

YHOO Revenue Quarterly data by YCharts

And, indeed, Yahoo’s sales have dropped 29 percent since 2007, with typically flat display revenue and declining search revenue, which was once Yahoo’s crown jewel. While operating margins have risen over the years, very few point to the company as an exciting growth story.

And it still isn’t, although investors are starting to consider it a possibility. We’ll see as Mayer makes more significant changes in 2013, hopefully underpinning the stock’s recent rise with a true story of financial strides.

But, for now, giddy shareholders probably should not get too far ahead of themselves. Not that you can stop them: Mayer fan Eric Jackson is calling for Yahoo’s stock to be over $40 again by end of 2013.

Whether the Mayer premium can do pull off that particular investor miracle or not remains to be seen.

Later today, new Yahoo CEO and latest savior Marissa Mayer is expected to debut in her first major turn as a public company CEO, as the company reports its third-quarter earnings.

Unfortunately, her initial script recounting the last three months is likely to be rather lackluster, with Wall Street anticipating yet another nothing-to-write-home-about financial performance from the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Investors are expecting $1.08 billion in revenue and 25 cents in net income per share in a report that is likely to show more of the same kind of weakness Yahoo has had for far too long. The main reasons this time: Worrisome growth in search and display advertising, especially compared to robust worldwide trends.

Such concerns have kept Yahoo’s stock pretty much flatlined at about $16 a share since she arrived in July.

And that is not likely to change until Wall Street hears more specifics about Mayer’s future plans. Yahoo has previously said she would outline more about her direction on the call with investors later today, after the financial results are released.

Thus, it’s basically a wait-and-see attitude, until Mayer does that, and perhaps until after there is some actual traction.

As noted by Cantor Fitzgerald’s Youssef Squali:

“1) We’ve seen this movie before (this new CEO is the fifth in as many years) and 2) it will take some time before any of the yet-to-be-announced changes yield any meaningful P&L results. Until then, we see Yahoo! shares remain cheap with limited downside, but no clear catalyst to drive them higher short/medium-term.”

Among the highlights that investors hope will be covered by Mayer and also by new CFO Ken Goldman:

A cogent strategy to turbocharge the business, which — as ATD has reported many times — will focus on tech and product solutions; what acquisition arenas are in the pipeline; plans for new talent recruitment and perhaps layoffs of less-than-stellar employees at the bottom 20 percent of Yahoo; the status of talks to sell off its stake in Yahoo Japan; and, perhaps most of all, what are the plans to return cash to shareholders from its recent sale of its partial stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

That might already be in the works via stock buybacks that Yahoo has been engaged in, but it will be interesting to see if Mayer will provide more specifics.

Investors will also look for some details around mobile growth, and perhaps an update of how Yahoo is fixing its search monetization problems with its partner, Microsoft.

One development that some expect is that Mayer will drop future expectations, in a classic take-out-the-trash move.

As J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth noted:

“Similar to what AOL CEO Tim Armstrong did when he stepped in a few years ago, we believe Mayer is likely to remove low quality ad units and over-monetization throughout the site. Despite the near-term monetization impact, we think this would be a good thing, as it would improve the user experience and de-clutter the site. Additionally, we think it’s likely new management would simply want to start off with a low bar.”

And, if she makes it low enough, anything Mayer will do going forward is likely to look pretty good.

So that’s what Tim Armstrong is going to do: After years of keeping its clips off YouTube, AOL is finally going to start distributing its video on Google’s site, via 22 branded “channels.”

TechCrunch will gets its own real estate there, and so will HuffPost Live, and Moviefone, etc.

These aren’t YouTube’s new channels, where Google offers video makers a cash advance in exchange for a window of exclusivity on the site.

Instead, the deal is constructed the way YouTube used to approach “premium” content makers: A simple Internet real estate + revenue sharing deal.

That is, AOL gives YouTube access to the stuff it’s already making, and sells the YouTube inventory itself. The clips will run using YouTube’s player, and the two companies split revenue.

A simple premise, with an obvious upside for both sides. The only real question is why it took this long to get it done. Perhaps Tim Armstrong’s predecessors didn’t fully appreciate YouTube’s heft, but the AOL CEO doesn’t have that excuse himself: His last big job at Google before he left for AOL was a YouTube overhaul.

Who can forget these famous first lines from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness …”

Now, look at this chart comparing the year-to-date stock performances of Yahoo and AOL, very similar companies with very different numbers:

Can AOL really be up more than 123 percent, while Yahoo — even after the appointment of a high-profile new CEO, Marissa Mayer, from Google — be down 8 percent?

The results for the past three months are slightly less pronounced, with AOL up almost 23 percent to Yahoo’s more than 4 percent decline. And, for the past month, AOL is up 7 percent and Yahoo is down almost 8 percent.

What gives — especially since Yahoo is arguably the company with better assets, properties and long-term prospects?

It seems to be a simple question of investor expectations met (AOL) versus expectations still unanswered (Yahoo).

In AOL’s case, for example, CEO Tim Armstrong — also an ex-Googler — finally seems to have delivered on assuaging investor worries about the slowness of the turnaround with better results at the New York-based, content-focused portal. In addition, the company just announced the particulars of a long-expected buyback of shares, and also a dividend from a $1.1 billion patent sale.

In other words, even if this means only a windfall for shareholders who bought in the trough a while back, investors are still cheering on such moves, and moving the stock to highs of $34 a share.

Many think that might not last, of course, unless Armstrong can keep up the advertising and other business gains, but — for now — investors are happy with him and AOL.

At Yahoo, though, it is still wait and see for Mayer, who is only just starting to put her own staff in place. So far, that seems to be to infuse some new blood, while also trying to get some of those pushed aside to stay — no packages for no one! — and help out.

Also a big question mark is the plan to revive Yahoo. And, while coming out with a strategy only a few months into her reign is definitely premature, the news that Mayer was likely keeping a big chunk of the billions in proceeds from the sale of its Alibaba assets in China, without any specifics to speak of yet, has made Wall Street tetchy and full of questions.

Such as: Will the future be building back up its advertising stack, and isn’t that pricey and difficult, given Google is the main competitor here? Or perhaps copying the e-commerce success in Asia for Yahoo properties, which begs the question of why sell Alibaba in the first pace? Maybe, media is the way (except Mayer was chosen for her tech expertise over content-centric Ross Levinsohn)? And what cool start-ups could be bought, and for how much, and will Yahoo pay too much for them? Lastly, and perhaps most of all, what will the magic set of products that Mayer is clearly capable of creating be, perchance?

Until some more substantive clarity here and elsewhere is delivered by Mayer — whether that’s unfair or not — it means a stock that will stay under a depressed $15 a share.

Thus, with apologies to Dickens, Wall Street investors wait and watch for the spring of hope at Yahoo, after the winter of despair, with hopes to be going direct to Heaven rather than going direct the other way.

And, if not Heaven, then they’ll certainly take $19 a share.

“Today’s announcement underscores AOL’s commitment to delivering value for our shareholders,” Chairman and Chief Executive Tim Armstrong said. “AOL remains committed to creating and unlocking value for all shareholders through smart execution and disciplined management of our asset portfolio.”

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If you’ve watched the streaming video that other newspapers and Web sites have put out, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect at 10 am ET today: Something that approximates the form of cable news, but with Webbier sensibilities and production values.

But HuffPost Live will stand out from the stuff you’ve seen from the likes of Politico, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), in a couple ways.

For starters, the site’s interface will look a lot different from its peers. Yes, you’ll still see talking heads, talking. But you’ll also see a lot of bells and whistles designed to highlight and encourage comments from viewers, including a “join this segment” feature that is supposed to let people chime in live via Webcam.

HuffPost Live will also spend a lot of time … live. While many of its competitors spend some time streaming live, HuffPo will be showing 12 hours of live programming a day, and HuffPost Live head Roy Sekoff thinks he can ramp that up to 16 hours next year. Still, most of HuffPost Live’s traffic will likely come from Web surfers who find clips after the fact.

And while lots of other news operations are tackling Web video by hiring a few producers and tech experts, then asking their existing staff to stand in front of a camera, HuffPo has bet big on this launch, with a staff of 100. You’ll see existing HuffPo talent on the screen from time to time, but almost everyone working on the video show has joined the company in recent months.

Here’s an edited version of an interview I conducted with Sekoff last week, as his team was putting its finishing touches on the new channel.

Kafka: There are a lot of news sites trying to do some kind of video programming now. But none of them are throwing 100 people at it. Why go this big?

Sekoff: I felt like I wanted to do something that was disruptive. You can go down the list, of all the people who are doing [web video], and it all looks the same — television not done very well. That wasn’t of interest. I just didn’t think we could be disruptive by doing the same thing — shooting editorial meetings, or shooting the newsroom with a reporter coming in and just chatting.

And you’re stressing the live component, and especially live commenting, much more than anyone else, too.

We want the community to be very involved, front and center. We want them to be an integral part of our programming, not an afterthought. Not “We have this expert, and we have that person Skyped in, and oh, John in Wyoming … sorry, we don’t have time for you, John.”

The only way to do that is if you’re live, in real time. Because you can’t get people to join you [otherwise]. You can’t do call-in radio on tape delay.

But like everyone else who does video, most of the views you’ll get won’t be from people watching live, right?

In order to join us live, we have to be live. [But] the other part of our business is very much on video-on-demand.

People want premium video content. How can you create a tremendous amount of video content at scale? [This] is actually a very cost effective way. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing the 12 hours. We want to be there when things are happening [and] we want to be able to churn out material. Every time we do a live segment, we’re clipping. We’re taking the best things that come up, and we’re embedding them in HuffPost stories.

So on-demand drives views and dollars. And you’ll also have live, which is a nice option.

Exactly.

The company just posted earnings of $10.17 per share and revenue of $531 million. Wall Street was looking for 10 cents and $519 million. The earnings number is inflated by AOL’s giant patent sale, but when you strip that out, you end up with 23 cents per share — a big ol’ beat.

But AOL’s underlying numbers look okay, too. Its crucial domestic ad display sales were flat, which is not good compared to Web peers like Google and Yahoo, but an improvement from last quarter’s declines. And it’s also better than AOL had predicted three months ago.

Another good sign for Armstrong is that AOL’s traffic is getting better — which by AOL’s standards means it is shrinking less. Visitors to the sites AOL owns were down 1 percent over the last year, but that’s a smaller decrease than previous quarters. Good thing, given that Armstrong spent a pile of money on sites like TechCrunch and the Huffington Post.

We’ll get more color after Armstrong’s conference call this morning; I’ll check back in after that.

Update: Not much to report in the way of additional data points from the call. Armstrong talked up Patch, his much-maligned local bet, and reiterated previous predictions that the unit would hit revenue of $40 million to $50 million this year. One subjective observation, though: Armstrong has often sounded defensive on these calls — most distressingly, he’s complained about negative press coverage more than once on these things — but not today. Quite relaxed, and happy to stick around and chat up analysts, even after the call stretched past the one-hour mark.

When I was in New York last week, I got a chance to sit down with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, the former not-Marissa-Mayer Googler, to talk about how it’s going in his thankless efforts to turn the New York-based Internet company around.

Unlike Mayer, who is just getting started at fixing what ails Yahoo, Armstrong has been at the job for some time now and finally seems to be getting some traction.

He talked about that and more in a video interview with me (which we did at Manhattan media-maven lunch spot Michael’s), including how it’s going with his always watchable acquisition of the Huffington Post and its eponymous founder Arianna Huffington.

Armstrong was feeling upbeat due to recent improvements in AOL’s business, as well as the lucrative sale of some patents and a victory over an activist shareholder proxy battle.

But, as usual, investors will need to focus on AOL’s performance, which will be on display in the morning when it reports its second-quarter earnings tomorrow at 5 am PT.

AOL beat expectations by 11 percent in the last quarter and Wall Street analysts expect the company to earn 10 cents per share, which has been guided down recently.

Still, because of all the recent good news, AOL’s stock has been up 82 percent since the beginning of the year, although it did drop 1.6 percent this past week.

Also important to tomorrow’s report is whether AOL can stem persistent revenue decreases in this quarter. Analysts are now expecting revenue of nearly $519 million for the period.

Here’s Armstrong chatting about the possibility that he can finally say that his long-suffering turnaround is actually turning:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120724/with-aol-set-to-report-q2-earnings-tomorrow-tim-armstrongs-feeling-closer-to-fine-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120716/the-marissa-mayer-yahoo-show-brought-to-you-by-dan-loeb/ http://allthingsd.com/20120716/the-marissa-mayer-yahoo-show-brought-to-you-by-dan-loeb/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:57:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=230619

The appointment of Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo earlier today was a definitively splashy move by the board of the troubled Internet giant.

And a key impresario of the showy hiring of the high-profile Google exec? None other than Yahoo’s former foe now turned driving force Daniel Loeb of the Third Point hedge fund.

It was classic Loeb style — brash, quick and done with an eye to the optics of the move as well as its impact.

The selection of the high-profile Mayer was unanimous among the Yahoo directors, who have now clearly gone in a product direction over a media one, represented by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The choice came down to Mayer or Levinsohn and, in this, there really was no choice to speak of given her much more honed tech and product pedigree.

Mayer was integral to the early days of Google especially, in charge for a long time over its search product. More recently, though, she had been working on local efforts.

But, it was notable to many inside and outside the company that she did not get one of the key senior vice president nods at Google in a major reorg of the company under new CEO Larry Page.

“She was pretty much voted off the island, even though she was critical to its earliest successes,” said one person close to the situation.

Recently, multiple sources said she had been quietly seeking an exit from the search giant, including considering several venture firms. She also recently joined the board of retail giant Walmart.

Loeb, who had met Mayer relatively recently, was one of the key forces in pushing the board to consider aiming for someone of her level.

In fact, multiple sources said that he has become an influential voice — perhaps the most influential — on the board. While there has been a search committee run by director David Kenny, Loeb has also been actively buttonholing prospects, including focusing his early CEO search efforts on Hulu’s Jason Kilar.

That did not pan out, as Kilar withdrew himself from contention, but sources said Loeb kept pushing for a big name who would burnish Yahoo’s bruised reputation.

It’s all part of a series of efforts by the New York hedge fund head — who has been spending a lot of time of late trying to learn the complicated byways of Silicon Valley — to be more than just a smash-and-grab money man.

Loeb now owns close to six percent of Yahoo and is intent on reviving its prospects and, more importantly, its moribund stock.

And nabbing Mayer — who often appears in glossy magazine spreads, part of an effort that she has promoted that has made her the face of the search giant over the last decade — fits into that strategy well.

Indeed, Mayer will now be charged with the difficult task of creating innovative products to win at Yahoo going forward and even competing with Google in some arenas.

It’s clear she will attract talent, and is reportedly considering several other current and former Googlers to bring on board at Yahoo.

It will take a lot of such deep expertise, given Yahoo’s dicey prospects of late, with problems ranging from its advertising technology to weak morale to, perhaps most importantly, the continued lack of a clear strategic direction.

Whether Mayer can stem the tide is unclear, with some comparing her task to an even bigger version of the massive challenges and slow turnaround another former Googler, Tim Armstrong, has faced at AOL.

“Is she the Tim show, part 2, or can she remake Yahoo into a successful narrative going forward?,” said one person close to the situation.

One thing’s for certain: Today, at least, it was also the Dan Loeb show.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120716/the-marissa-mayer-yahoo-show-brought-to-you-by-dan-loeb/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/ http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/#comments Thu, 14 Jun 2012 15:31:12 +0000 William Launder and Jon Kamp http://allthingsd.com/?p=220398 AOL Inc. Thursday won a proxy fight with activist investor Starboard Value, relieving some of the scrutiny of Chief Executive Tim Armstrong’s investments in online content businesses like Patch.com and the Huffington Post.

A majority of shares voted at AOL’s annual meeting were to re-elect all eight of AOL’s current board members, rather than take on any of the three candidates proposed by activist shareholder Starboard Value, according to a preliminary estimate by AOL. A final count of shareholder votes is expected later Thursday.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120602/iss-gives-starboard-the-nod-for-2-board-seats-in-aol-proxy-fight/ http://allthingsd.com/20120602/iss-gives-starboard-the-nod-for-2-board-seats-in-aol-proxy-fight/#comments Sat, 02 Jun 2012 22:46:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=215884 A minor victory for the dissident investors waging a proxy fight against AOL: Institutional Shareholder Services is recommending that investors vote for two of Starboard Value LP’s three board nominees.

The shareholder advisory service gave the nod to Starboard CEO Jeff Smith and Dennis Miller, a former partner at Spark Capital. ISS noted that Miller seems less committed to the idea that AOL needs to abandon Patch, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s expensive local-news bet.

In a press release, AOL claimed its own victory, noting that ISS didn’t back all three of Starboard’s nominees. “We believe that ISS’s recommendation to dismiss Starboard’s full slate is further evidence that Starboard’s nominees are unqualified to lead AOL.” (Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Starboard had nominated eight board members.)

And it didn’t have anything nice to say about Smith and Miller: “We do not believe that Mr. Smith or Mr. Miller have demonstrated a basic understanding of AOL’s business model, nor do we believe that they have a viable plan for AOL other than to break up and liquidate the company.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120602/iss-gives-starboard-the-nod-for-2-board-seats-in-aol-proxy-fight/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/with-stock-close-to-all-time-high-aol-tells-activist-shareholder-to-go-to-well-you-know/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/with-stock-close-to-all-time-high-aol-tells-activist-shareholder-to-go-to-well-you-know/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 22:06:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=212278

AOL filed an investor presentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission today tooting its own horn, in prep for its upcoming annual meeting in which it is still facing a proxy challenge.

In a nutshell, readying to battle an alternate slate put up by Starboard Value: Our stock more than doubled from all-time lows of last summer; our turnaround is turning; we sold a buttload of patents that netted us a truckload of cash; and, of course, we’re not going to settle like Yahoo did with Daniel Loeb of Third Point, because CEO Tim Armstrong’s resume is fine and dandy, thank you very much!

(Okay, I made up the last one, but I am peckish today.)

In any case, AOL shares have indeed been on a fast upward move since the $1 billion patent sale, up 103 percent in the last six months, to close at $27.61 today.

Enjoy the pretty AOL slides:

AOL_Investor_Deck_May24

AOL-20120524-DFAN14A-0

AOL_Investor_Presentation_Release_May24

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/with-stock-close-to-all-time-high-aol-tells-activist-shareholder-to-go-to-well-you-know/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/for-aol-a-costly-gamble-on-local-news-draws-trouble/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/for-aol-a-costly-gamble-on-local-news-draws-trouble/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 15:00:12 +0000 Keach Hagey http://allthingsd.com/?p=211417 Patch.com, a network of small-town news sites owned by AOL Inc., has emerged at the center of a tug of war over the Internet company’s future.

The high cost of running the local-news sites has fueled a campaign by dissident investor Starboard Value LP against AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong’s strategy of investing heavily in online content.

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