AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has fired two major executives recently. Armstrong fired COO Kim Partoll and SVP of search and local media John Kannapell. Armstrong is preparing to spin AOL off from Time Warner as a public company again. People within the organization said that they are not planning on replacing the two anytime soon either.
RR Donnelley is a media communications company that has just invested $4.4 million in Helium. Helium is a citizen journalism and digital content that focuses on a range of topics from arts & humanities to travel.
The financial terms were undisclosed and CEO Mark Ranalli confirmed the investment. Last October, Helium raised over $17 million in a first round of funding from Signature Capital. Helium board members include Jeff Levick and Steve Pogorzelski.
Helium has built a freelance writing community where publishers can post assignments on a per-article basis or share ad revenue. Helium was founded in 2006 and has over 1.25 million articles.
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.
