I No Longer Want Yahoo and AOL to Merge

I’ve written several times that I thought AOL and Yahoo should merge and create a very strong force in both the content and advertising spaces. After what I’ve seen Yahoo do to itself over the past couple of months, I no longer believe that a combination would be good for AOL. During my time at Graphing Social Patterns this week, I met a large number of AOL’ers who all explained to me how great times are at AOL these days. From what they told me, morale appears quite high. It seems like all of the wheels are in motion. Could AOL take Yahoo’s slot in the ranks? Might have seemed crazy 18 months ago but not so crazy anymore. I used to believe in Yahoo - can’t say I do today.

If AOL management was smart, they would call a company-wide meeting and get the horses moving even faster and explain that there’s a chance now to step into a leading role and take Yahoo’s place in the ranks. I can only imagine that the morale at Yahoo must be horrible right now. Yahoos are leaving left and right and the company just signed itself away to the devil. Shareholders may love the deal in the short-term (they don’t care about people) but in the long-term, it will hurt Yahoo way more than help. And this is why AOL should do what it can to take every ounce of life that Yahoo has left. Offer incentives to Yahoo advertisers to switch, hire key Yahoos and continue to ramp up the content development effort.

AOL should also ramp up their OpenSocial effort even more and maybe win developers away from Yahoo. Imagine if developers got behind AOL as well?

AOL’s deal with Google for advertising will continue to fly under the radar and I think it’s fine for AOL to continue the deal. Eventually I’d like to see Platform-A take over ad sales but let’s first get part I done. Steve Poland disagrees and adds his views on why AOL and Yahoo should still merge.

Is AOL perfect? Heck no. But would any dealings with Yahoo now help the company? Heck no.