Tim Armstrong’s First Earnings Call: “AOL Is Not A Quarterly Project”

AOL announced its first quarterly earnings today as a newly public company. Fourth quarter revenues dropped 8% to $471.6 million, and turned a profit of $1.4 million (see the slides below). Notes from CEO Tim Armstrong’s first conference call are below. He laid out AOL’s strategy, warned that sales would probably be dampened this quarter as a result of reducing a third of its workforce and noted that “AOL is not a quarterly project.” He also said that AOl will pursue new paid subscription services in the future.

Here are my live notes:

Tim Armstrong:

We have an aggressive strategy, starts and ends with execution,

We have gone through major cost reduction, reducing one third of workforce
built and designed Seed, our new content management system
cleaned up Mail (fewer ads)
adding to management team,
recent acquisition of StudioNow
a new middle market sales team
redesigned sales process,
reignited AOl’s brand with agencies,
completed spinout from Time Warner.

Most important thing, we put the heartbeat and will to win back into AOL

Strategy we are going after
1. in content, building content platforms for journalists on the web, matching technology with content can capture large audiences.
2. 2. In advertising want to help brand advertisers transition to the Web
3. 3. Communications, working on new platform
4. 4. Paid services, we will be testing services and subscriptions in 2010

Some major items on the checklist
1 scale content production and content partnerships
2 launch anew brand platform
3. scale the number of local communities
4. stop decline of communications products and launch new ones
5. launch paid services

7. recur

It is difficult to remove a third of workforce without some impact, may see some dampening on ad sales, AOl is not a quarterly project.