Former Canwest Global Communications executive Graham Moysey is the new general manager of AOL Canada.
Moysey, formerly senior vice-president and general manager of digital media at Canwest Global, departed Canwest just as the new Postmedia regime was planting its flag. Prior to that, Moysey played a primary role in the web portal partnership between MSN and Bell Sympatico as vice-president of sales and business development at Bell Canada. He also sits on the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada’s board of directors.
These are interesting times at AOL, a former Internet access giant, which six months ago was spun out of Time Warner under the leadership of CEO (and former Google chief of sales) Tim Armstrong with a renewed focus on original content. Moysey joins a growing number of recently hired executives from places like Digg, Yahoo and Google to join the once-lumbering web giant.
“I’m obviously very excited to be on board,” said Moysey, about two hours into the new job at AOL’s Toronto offices. “I was really excited to get back to a digital pure-play that was focused on content and technology. AOL, under the new leadership of Tim [Armstrong] and his team, has proven that not only can they attract some incredible talent, but they’ve put together a very bold and ambitious plan around quality and unique content creation.”
That plan is to shift the company’s revenues from its Internet-access past to content assets such as Engadget, Mapquest and AOL Health.
Advertising Age reported earlier this month that AOL’s U.S. ad revenue in the second quarter declined 27% to $296.9 million, down from $407.2 million a year ago. Total revenues overall were off 27% to $584.1 million, short of Wall Street’s expected $602 million and down from $791.5 million last year.
Armstrong told Ad Age he is more focused on how many people AOL reaches with its products and services, a cornerstone of future display-ad revenue. AOL reached about 112 million unique U.S. users a month in the second quarter, according to ComScore, about flat with the first quarter of 2010.
In Canada, Moysey said that AOL possesses phenomenally strong assets from an engagement perspective, reaching just under 10 million monthly uniques.
“I was very attracted to the organization, not only because of the new energy that these guys are trying with this transformational model, but I’m a big believer in unique and quality content as a place to hang the shingle of very significant brands,” he said. “From an engagement perspective, [in Canada] the numbers are there and I think there’s an opportunity to draw a significant amount of revenue on market and grow what’s already been done within this office.”
Moysey couldn’t comment on how much original content will be Canadian-made, but did say that the Canadian contingent is “a growing staff of editorial and content folks here with a mandate to build-out Canadian specific content and filter Canadian-specific content and stories into U.S.-based assets so they are relevant to the Canadian marketplace.”
