AOL's chief executive officer, Jonathan Miller, is up on stage at the Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco. John Battelle is interviewing him. Here are some highlights from the talk.
About AOL's new strategy of going free: "Absolutely the right move. We wanted to go there for a long time, but we needed the strength from the advertising market to do it."
Since going free, AOL has seen explosive growth in sign-ups. "We had a pricing problem rather than a product problem."
96% of the usage of AOL.com comes from broadband users.
On Open Ride: "It's designed for people who want an immersive experience, not for people who want to manage every piece of their online experience."
On how Web 2.0 has changed the web economy: "In the Web 2.0 world, we've all seen an explosion of great consumer products, services and companies world-wide. At the same time as that usage fragmentation, it appears that there's consolidation on the monetization side. The people who the consolidation is happening around is us, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft."
Can that last? "I don't think that consolidation is going to last forever."
Were you interested in YouTube? "Yes."
What stopped you? "Money. It's very hard for any company to go to YouTube and pay cash. And if you can't pay cash, you have to pay stock. There's only one company that could have pulled that off, and they did." (Battelle added: "And then the acquisition was paid for within a day when their market value went up by five YouTubes.")
On Relegence, which AOL acquired this morning: "There haven't been too many new ideas around portals. But how do you bring in new ideas to that model? The answer is what Relegence does: real time information. People want that high speed information, and that's what's going to revolutionize the portal."
AOL labs and open APIs: "To me, the real change happening at AOL is that we're going to become a product company again. We've restructured the company around products and product lines."
What did AOL learn from the release of users' search queries: "The thing that really hurt about that was that it was done from an entirely well-meaning place. People within the company did it for academic reasons, and it was a bad call. A very bad call. We want to be part of the larger community on the web, to participate in academia and openness, but you don't do that. There are rules of the road, like don't drink and drive. The web community has rules, too, and you need to balance your goals to participate with those rules."
On internet video: "I think IPTV, video on demand and social video will be absolutely huge in single digit years. It's on the way, and I firmly believe that. I also believe that pre-roll ads will not be the wave of the future. It doesn't provide a desirable experience, and I want AOL to be the company that figures out the model that will work."
