AOL shares up on first sales rise in eight years

09 Feb 2013

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Shares of AOL Inc, the web publisher and owner of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, rose the most in three months in New York trading after it posted the first sales gain in eight years.

Fourth-quarter sales were up 3.9 per cent as against a year earlier to $599.5 million. According to estimates of analysts, revenue was to fall to $566.7 million in the period.

The surprise growth came mostly from AOL's third-party ad sales business, which helped other web publishers sell ad space through automated systems --a process called programmatic buying.

AOL Inc chief executive officer Tim Armstrong has worked for the company's transformation into an advertising-based content publisher from its roots as an internet service provider.

Armstrong said in an interview that the future of advertising would be more machine-to-machine trading, in a reference to the increase in trading desks used to buy and sell digital ad inventory, similar to the way stock markets worked. He added, this would also be accompanied by a growth in the human side of buying.

The company's shares rose 7.4 per cent to $33.72 at the close in New York, the biggest one-day increase since November. AOL's stock has shot up 86 per cent over the past 12 months, better than the 12 per cent return from the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

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