AOL has announced that it has hired former Google executive Jeff Levick as President of global advertising and strategy.

AOL is reportedly buying back a 5% stake owned by Google, and it has a new CEO in Tim Armstrong, formerly of Google. A spinoff from Time Warner is also anticipated.

Time Warner Inc has named Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, as its new Chairman and CEO of AOL, in a move it hopes will help the company improve its advertising sales and prepare it for a spin-off.

Time Warner Inc has named Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, as its new Chairman and CEO of AOL, in a move it hopes will help the company improve its advertising sales and prepare it for a spin-off.

Time Warner Inc has named Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, as its new Chairman and CEO of AOL, in a move it hopes will help the company improve its advertising sales and prepare it for a spin-off.

Time Warner Inc has named Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, as its new Chairman and CEO of AOL, in a move it hopes will help the company improve its advertising sales and prepare it for a spin-off.

Roughly three years ago, Google bought a five percent stake in AOL for $1 billion.  AOL then went down the tubes, and more recently, the economy has done the same.  So everyone’s favorite search giant has now put Time Warner into a position where it may have to offer something of a refund. 

It was recently announced that Time Warner would be selling off AOL split into different sections, with the dial-up business going to one buyer, and the advertising and content part going to another.

In fact, Time Warner reported that AOL’s display ad revenue had dropped a whopping 14% in the quarter.

Time Warner may or may not want to get rid of AOL, according to a new report.  It’s taken some preparatory steps towards a sale, however, and figured out how the unit could be split up and unloaded as two different pieces.

You’ve heard said "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," now Yahoo wants to test the boundaries of that maxim to the full.

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have reached an agreement with New York officials to ban access to child pornography.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said the Internet service providers will block access to child pornography newsgroups and remove the content from their servers.

The agreements will affect customers in New York and in the rest of the country. Talks are ongoing to get other Internet service providers to adopt the same policy.

Beaumont, TX, earned the distinction of being the testing ground for metered Internet service for the heaviest users of network capacity.

Former AOL Time Warner CFO John Michael Kelly and seven other people were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with causing the overstatement of ad revenue by over a billion dollars.

CBS fared better on an ad revenue per person basis for its NCAA basketball tournament delivery online than on TV. So why is Gossip Girl being dragged offline for viewing only on the CW Network, partly owned by CBS?

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said today that the company plans to divide AOL’s Internet access business and its ad-supported audience business, which includes AOL’s online services and content.

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, has released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace for December 2007.

Among core search engines in December 2007, Google Sites remained the top search property with 5.6 billion core searches conducted, representing a 58.4 percent share of the search market.

December U.S. Core Search Rankings

ComScore today released their numbers for December 2007 and Google took a bit of a slide. Here’s what happened in December:

Yahoo!

Fewer queries entering search engines in a soft November didn’t hurt Google’s market share, but Yahoo and Ask gave up a little bit.

I know you’ve missed it, so here it is—Linky! Goodness! Linky! Goodness!

AOL has launched a beta version of BlueString, a free Web site that allows users to upload, store, manage, create and share digital media.