AOL LLC will be laying off 700 employees, cutting costs in several online services by shutting them down, and will be closing several lifestyle blogs.  A lot of the job cuts were made because there has been a slow down in advertising revenue and management hasn’t been making the best decisions with the company.  At the bottom of this post, I have pasted an e-mail that AOL CEO Randy Falco sent to the company.

Some of the Weblogs Inc. blogs being shut down in February include Gadling, ParentDish, and SlashFood.  Weblogs Inc. is a company that AOL bought for about $25 million.  Weblogs was started by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey.  Unfortunately, AOL won’t be selling any of the blogs back to Calacanis according to his Twitter account.  As a matter of fact, AOL hasn’t really responded to his emails either.

On top of the lay offs, AOL is getting rid of raises and will be consolidating some of their facilities.  AOL’s valuation has plummeted from $20 billion to $5.5 billion since 2005.  This is why Google has to write down their $1 billion investment in AOL.

Below is the e-mail from the AOL CEO: