It is reported that AOL received confirmation from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to withhold information about their search deal with Google from their quarterly report earlier this month.
Largely, the deal with Google to power AOL’s search is one of the revenue streams that is profitable and continues to growth year on year. Late 2005 Google invested $1B into AOL buying 5% of the company, now that AOL has bought back that share it does leave AOL in a position to negotiate other potential partners.
Yahoo! is in the process of migrating to Bing powering it’s search results so is there any other viable option between Google and Microsoft for AOL? I suspect that AOL will choose a path that is most financially rewarding than a strategic consideration of the search market share.
I see a lot of negative comments around what AOL will do in the future, but I feel that many opinions are based around an ISP and the AOL client which people loved to hate. Since joining as CEO, Tim Armstrong has shown commitment and momentum to turn the business around that has not been seen to the same extent in the past. No one likes hearing of decisions that involve cutting staff, however but I have no doubt that Tim will do his damndest grow AOL to achieve great things.