New York — Ever since Tim Armstrong took over leadership at AOL as CEO from his earlier job managing the Mountain View company’s sales department, AOL has been pretty successful in poaching former Google colleagues to help with the overhaul of the trouble plagued Internet company. The media company has poached another high-profile Google executive “David Eun,” the executive who functioned as Google’s ambassador to Hollywood’s television and film community, to become president of AOL Media and Studios as it seeks to forge a viable content business out of the ashes of the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger.
Eun will be liable for managing AOL’s more than 80 content sites and its new SEED.com publishing platform, in addition to its recently acquired StudioNow video platform and AOL’s NYC and LA studios.
“David carries an impressive breadth of media experience to AOL at an exciting juncture for our company,” AOL Chairman and Chief Executive Tim Armstrong said in a statement.
Eun is a former executive of NBC and Time Warner. At the latter, he was chief of staff over a set of businesses that included AOL, Time Warner Cable and Time Inc, the magazine publishing division. To many in the media circle, Eun was the public face of YouTube, whose dominance of online video helped it define content owners and advertisers views of digital distribution, Armstrong said.
“It is a natural progression for us as we build out the content division,” Armstrong, said. “We want to be the broadest scale producer of content for Internet.”
Eun is replacing Bill Wilson, president of AOL Media, who will exit the company in May. Wilson, a nine-year veteran of AOL, was an architect of the company’s latest plan to blanket the web with originally produced content by targeting specific categories.
According to The Financial Times, they discovered that Wilson was considering quitting the company in December, but was told by several executives at the time that it was not true. Wilson was on Thursday not reachable for further comment.
Wilson, who has been attributed with directing AOL’s move to develop original content, will remain with the company until May. Wilson was seen as one of the last of the old guard still in place after Wilson moved to AOL in March of 2009. It was thought likely that Wilson might stick around because his philosophy regarding AOL was seen as compatible with Armstrong’s.
The once-dominant Internet access provider is battling with slumping ad revenue and subscribers — although the dial-up access business is no longer its focus. Under Armstrong, AOL is attempting to shed its image of dot-com has-been and remake itself as as a sort of digital media powerhouse with content that attracts about 100 million monthly visitors.
At AOL, Eun will report directly to Armstrong — who he worked for at Google not long ago. As a Time Warner stalwart, Eun has some familiarity with his new home, having helped managed media and communications back when that unhappy corporate union was still in effect. AOL was spun off from Time Warner in December.
Why rejoin a company that just reported revenue down 17% year-over-year?
“AOL has a unique opportunity to bring together its core strengths in the key areas of content and journalism, distribution, and advertising,” said Eun. “These three elements will be fundamental to success as the media and technology industries evolve and converge.”
Ever since Armstrong exited Google for AOL, a number of senior Google employees have followed his path. Last April, Jeff Levick — Google’s then VP of industry development and marketing — said he was jumping ship to serve as head of AOL’s advertising business Platform-A.
More recently, last September, AOL brought on ex-Google exec Shashi Seth as SVP of global advertising products. When Seth left Google, he was head of monetization for YouTube.
Google declined to make Eun available for an interview, but issued a statement thanking him for his work.