AOL Company Profile

We are a leading global web services company with a suite of brands and offerings and a substantial worldwide audience. Our business spans online content, products and services that we offer to consumers, publishers and advertisers. We are focused on attracting and engaging internet consumers by creating high quality content, products and services at scale and providing valuable online advertising services on both our owned and operated properties and third-party websites. We also operate one of the largest internet subscription access services in the United States.

Our business operations are focused on the following:

AOL Properties. We seek to be a leading online publisher of relevant and engaging online content and provider of engaging consumer products and services, by utilizing open and highly scalable publishing platforms and content management systems. In addition, we have extended and continue to extend the reach of our offerings to our consumer audience on multiple platforms and digital devices. AOL Properties include our owned and operated content, products and services in HPMG, AOL Services and Local and Mapping strategy areas in addition to our AOL Ventures offerings. AOL Properties also include co-branded websites owned or operated by third parties for which certain criteria have been met, including that the internet traffic has been assigned to us.

Advertising. We generate advertising revenues from AOL Properties through the sale of display advertising and search and contextual advertising. We also generate advertising revenues through the sale of advertising on third-party websites, which we refer to as the “Third Party Network.” Our mission is to provide an open and transparent advertising system that is easy-to-use and offers our publishers and advertisers unique and valuable insights. We seek to grow the number of publishers and advertisers utilizing the Third Party Network.

AOL Properties
HPMG
HPMG seeks to be a leading online publisher of relevant and engaging online content and provider of engaging consumer products and services, by utilizing scalable publishing platforms, social engagement platforms and content management systems. In addition, we have extended and continue to extend the reach of our offerings to our consumer audience on multiple platforms and digital devices. HPMG offerings include original content produced through our large network of content creators, which includes professional journalists from new and traditional media, freelance writers and bloggers, content we license from third parties and aggregations of user-generated content. Our content offerings are made available to broad audiences through sites such as The Huffington Post, as well as to niche audiences on highly-targeted, branded properties, such as The Huffington Post Women, The Huffington Post Parents and The Huffington Post Black Voices. Additionally, we seek to enter joint ventures and strategic partnerships with third parties with established brands in an effort to expand our content offerings. To facilitate the intake, creation, management and publication of original content, we utilize publishing platforms and content management systems that are designed to scale in a cost-effective manner in order to produce a large variety of relevant content for consumers.

AOL Services
AOL Services encompasses our paid services, search, the AOL.com homepage and mail operations, including mobile development and other offerings.
AOL Services includes our subscription access service, which provides a number of online services including narrow-band (telephone dial-up) access to the internet. We are developing, testing and marketing additional AOL and third-party products and services that are offered to internet consumers generally. Some products or services are offered to access subscribers for no additional charge or at a discounted rate in order to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Computer tools, maintenance and warranty services, online technical support, anti-virus software, identity theft protection, online and social media privacy and reputation monitoring services, diet and fitness services, online learning and other lifestyle services are currently offered and additional categories may be added in the future. Consumers will be able to manage their products and services through this platform, including adding or canceling a product or service. AOL continues to develop and offer other paid services as a way to attract, engage and serve consumers. Currently, the majority of the consumers for our paid services products are also access subscribers.
The revenue related to these products and services is recognized as subscription revenue in cases where we are responsible for providing the service to the end consumer. In instances when we are promoting a third-party product and receiving performance compensation on those services, but the third party is responsible for providing the service to the end consumer, we recognize the revenue as display advertising revenue.

Competition
We compete for the time and attention of consumers with a wide range of internet companies, including Yahoo! Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corporation’s MSN, IAC/Interactive-Corp. and social networking companies such as Facebook, Inc. and Twitter, Inc., as well as traditional media companies which are increasingly offering their own internet products and services. On the local level, we face increased competition from a wide range of companies offering services and products for towns and communities, such as Yelp!
We compete for advertisers and publishers with a wide range of companies offering competing advertising products, technology and services, aggregators of such advertising products, technology and services and demand side-platforms and other aggregators of third-party advertising inventory. We also compete for talent in technology skills and content creation. In addition to those companies listed above, competitors include WPP plc (24/7 Real Media, Inc.) and ValueClick, Inc. Competition among these companies has been intensifying and may lead to continuing decreases in prices for certain advertising inventory as well as lower demand.
Our subscription access service competes with other internet access providers, especially broadband providers.
Internationally, our primary competitors are global enterprises such as Yahoo!, Google, MSN, IAC, Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as a large number of local enterprises.