BuzzFeed is one of my most favorite time-pass websites because they have interesting galleries and lists of pop culture. BuzzFeed has raised $15.5 million in Series C funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Other investors that participated include Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, SoftBank, and RRE Capital. NEA General Partner Patrick Kerins will be joining the BuzzFeed board of directors. Ken Lerer, the Huffington Post co-founder and BuzzFeed board member, will become the BuzzFeed executive chairman.

Former Yahoo! executive Ash Patel has started a $10 million micro-venture investment company. The investment company is called Morado Ventures. “Morado” translates to “purple,” which is Yahoo!’s color.

[Jeff Levick]

AOL has hired Jeff Levick, a former executive at Google.  Levick will become the president of global advertising and strategy, who will directly report to new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.  Armstrong himself was Google’s former North America ad sales head a couple of months ago.

“This is a perfect time to join AOL and I firmly believe that AOL’s best days are ahead of it,” stated Levick. “The company has one of the largest and most engaged audiences on the Web, some of the best advertising technology in the business, and a powerful third-party network. There is great opportunity here for us to capture.”

Greg Coleman was replaced by Levick.  The reason why he was let go is unknown.  Coleman joined AOL in February 2009.  That he was at AOL for less than 3 months!  Coleman was an advertising head at Yahoo! before AOL.

Lynda Clarizio will be stepping down as the head of AOL’s Platform-A advertising unit and will be replace by Greg Coleman, an advertising executive from Yahoo!  Last week Scott Moore left Yahoo! and took a similar job at Microsoft.  Jeff Dossett of Microsoft left the position open for Moore when he stepped down from Yahoo!

Clarizio was running Advertising.com in Baltimore.  Clarizio wasn’t the type of sales person that they were looking for in terms of making advertising deals.  AOL is having a hard time making the advertising revenue that they were succeeding with in the past.

Coleman was friends with AOL CEO Randy Falco for quite some time.  The hiring was rumored to be requiring the approval of new Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes due to competitive agreements.  Coleman worked at Yahoo! for seven years.