• Silicon Alley Insider, Monday, March 23, 2009 11:45 AM

Between 2007 and 2008, page views at AOL soared, but ad revenues fell a whopping 24%. This, Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson notes, cost CEO Randy Falco, COO Ron Grant and Platform A sales chief Lydia Clarizio their jobs.

So, if Tim Armstong, AOL's newly anointed chairman and CEO, wants to keep his job (which he hasn't even started yet), Carlson says "fixing AOL's sales force will be his principle challenge."

Carlson asks Alan Citron, the founding editor of AOL's most popular blog, TMZ, to expound upon the problems facing said sales force. He says there are three problems in particular: AOL has too much inventory to sell, Advertising.com is too much of a crutch (i.e. its biz model creates the feeling that whatever you don't sell will be sold off anyway), and sales people don't do an adequate job selling the company's individual brands.

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