AOL to lay off 150 people

AOL will cut some 150 people out of the restructuring plan, mostly from the sales department. AOL will also integrate some sites: Game website Joystiq and Apple news website TUAW will be merged into Engadget, and AOL Autos has been merged into Autoblog. AOL will also incorporate the UK's parentdish and mydaily two Web sites into the Huffington Post UK station.

AOL's restructuring plan was first disclosed earlier this month. It is said that Joystiq will still be in the form of Engadget independent channels, while TUAW content will be merged into Engadget. However, it is not known whether the brands of these two sites will remain.

Joystiq and TUAW were founded in 2004, and have been affiliated to the Weblogs Company, which specializes in producing some of the more content of the blog, so far its coverage topics have included automobiles, Photoshop, Google, Yahoo, open source software, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, TV, Mother and child.

It turns out that selling ads on these highly vertical blogs is not easy, and most of weblogs's blog sites are not very well off, especially since the company was acquired by AOL in 2005. However, Weblogs's Engadget by adding more product evaluation video, open a variety of column branches and grow into a more comprehensive blog, Gizmodo although not according to Engadget of the original move, but also no longer just focus on the vertical field of electronics.

TUAW is not, it has always been concerned about the Apple field News, its layout from 2004 to now there is no big change. It is true that one person is interested in every piece of news, but advertisers are not too keen to cater to these people, and AOL's abandonment of TUAW is not an exception, just a few months ago, IDG cut off the print version of Macworld and laid off its website operations team.

After restructuring the sales department, AOL will turn more resources into programmatic advertising and more technical resources to replace the human salesman. AOL is expected to release its results for fiscal year 2014 on February 11, when it mentioned some of the adjustments to be made in 2015 in its November 2014 earnings. At the time, CEO Tim Armstrong said: "First, we will focus on our capital allocation resource management and management time according to asset size and platform." Second, we will organize portfolio products related to the scale of asset growth. Third, we will simplify everything that can be simplified. "So this reorganization is not surprising.