Over 90 days into his role as
president of AOL's Media and Studios division, David Eun is outlining the company's singular mission as a top content creator.
The plan is to "galvanize and build content networks of scale
that can win," Eun tells Online Media Daily. "I don't think it's a secret to say that the turnaround of AOL is hinged on content ... It's going to make or break [the company.]"
To win the content
game, AOL plans to hire "hundreds" of journalists, editors and various multimedia creators over the next year, according to Eun.
AOL also plans to consolidate its roughly 80 content channels into
17 "super networks," which will be made up of about 30 distinct Web sites, and span broad content categories, including sports, news, finance, and communities. "We want to cover niche content, and
we'll still be very comprehensive in our coverage, but we want to channel that coverage," said Eun.
To grow further, Eun also considers partnerships crucial to AOL's success, and is "absolutely
open" to mergers and acquisitions. Eun outlined these plans on Wednesday during an all-hands company meeting in New York. AOL presently employs roughly 500 full-time editorial employees.
Since
March, Eun's purview has included AOL's SEED.com publishing platform, as well as its recently acquired StudioNow video platform and AOL's NYC and LA studios. While these platforms already rely on more
than 40,000 freelancers, Eun says that number only continue to grow. Eun joined from Google, where he served as vice president of strategic partnerships, and was responsible for managing global
content partnerships for Google as well as YouTube.
At AOL, Eun reports directly to Armstrong -- who he worked for at Google. Until 2006, Eun helped to oversee AOL as VP of operations for the
Media & Communications Group at Time Warner.
Since March 2009, when Tim Armstrong left Google for AOL, a number of Google senior employees have followed his lead. 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.
Prior to AOL and Time Warner, Eun was a partner at Arts Alliance,
a venture capital firm focusing on digital media, information technology and business services. He started his career in media at NBC, where he led some of NBC's first cross-media initiatives
involving television programming, the Internet, and retail consumer products.