AOL has confirmed its 160-strong workforce in Dublin will be unaffected by the restructure that has seen it cut 900 staff – 20pc of its workforce – following its US$315m buyout of The Huffington Post.
Yesterday, it emerged that the company revealed plans to lay off 200 staff in the US and 400 in India, and said 300 other roles would be outsourced.
Siliconrepublic.com spoke with a representative of the company who said that the online media firm has grown its workforce from 101 people to 160 people in the past year and is still recruiting.
The company recently moved its Irish operations from CityWest to a state-of-the-art facility near Heuston Station.
Building the next-generation media company
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been changing AOL’s focus towards next-generation media content and a recent buying spree saw it snap up TechCrunch in September and last month it bought The Huffington Post for US$315m.
Responding to questions from Siliconrepublic.com, a spokesman said: “AOL is focused on becoming the premier content network on the web. The Dublin operation is aligned to this strategy and is therefore complementary to the organisations’ current restructuring efforts.
“In the past 12 months, employee numbers have grown from 101 to 160 and recruitment is ongoing.
“Dublin is building the platforms that will support AOL’s global editorial content and is aligned with the integration of The Huffington Post into the AOL group,” the spokesman said.
The Huffington Post attracts 4m comments a month and its audience is growing at a rate of 22pc a month. Arianna Huffington will be made editor of all AOL digital content.
The combined AOL/Huffington Post entity will have a user base of 117m unique visitors a month in the US and 253m around the world.
