A Yahoo news wire story reports that AOL’s earnings call revealed that it’s lost another 399,000 subscribers on dial-up and that revenue declined 7%, but it still had an operating profit of $109 million, up from a loss of $ billion a year ago and expects ad sales to (finally) go up.
I’m tempted to ask how much of that operating profit had to do with the third year in a row of layoffs. Cutting the ad sales group(reportedly down to 80 on the national sales team) and the Mountain View campus ( 350), plus other unannounced cuts in the Studio and elsewhere had to help drive costs down. It’s to AOL’s credit that the AOL 9.0 client has so many cool things about it given the reductions in force, but one wonders if, internally, staffers feel like they’ve cut muscle and bone–or if the place was so bloated for so long, many of the cuts didn’t hurt remaining staffers that much.
A Yahoo news wire story reports that AOL’s earnings call revealed that it’s lost another 399,000 subscribers on dial-up and that revenue declined 7%, but it still had an operating profit of $109 million, up from a loss of $ billion a year ago and expects ad sales to (finally) go up.
I’m tempted to ask how much of that operating profit had to do with the third year in a row of layoffs. Cutting the ad sales group(reportedly down to 80 on the national sales team) and the Mountain View campus ( 350), plus other unannounced cuts in the Studio and elsewhere had to help drive costs down. It’s to AOL’s credit that the AOL 9.0 client has so many cool things about it given the reductions in force, but one wonders if, internally, staffers feel like they’ve cut muscle and bone–or if the place was so bloated for so long, many of the cuts didn’t hurt remaining staffers that much.