AOL has announced that they are cutting almost 40 employees from the AIM and AOL Mail units this week. According to an employee of the company, almost the entire AIM staff was laid off and the only people left are basic support staff. Additionally, the EVP who ran the decision and their head of Operation have left the company.
This is strange news since the company actually makes over $50M a year in advertising, but spends over half of it running the division for some reason. The problem aim is encountering is that it is having to compete with other companies like Google that have created Gchat, and Facebook which seems to dominate most people conversations now.
The result of the cuts mean that there will be very little innovation put into AIM, and it will probably have few updates and be able to compete with the other instant messaging products coming out. They have made it clear they are moving away from supporting products and putting all their time and money into their content platforms.
This is a disappointment, because despite the plethora of other messaging products, AIM is very much still used by many professionals who see its see it much easier to use than Facebook chat or anything built into other platforms. Much of the performance marketing industry is still run on AIM.
