AOL is moving its headquarters location from Dulles, VA to New York City as part of a "realignment" that parent company Time Warner hopes will boost ad sales revenues. As yet another move in a long series of attempts to turn AOL into an advertising powerhouse, AOL is creating something called Platform A, a one-stop shop for advertisers to buy inventory across a wide-range of third-party affiliated sites as well as across AOL-owned properties, including Advertising.com, TACODA, Third Screen Media, Lightningcast and ADTECH.
The move is a big blow to the Northern Virginia Tech corridor, which owes its very existence to the rise of Loudon County-based AOL. Although the company contends that most of the 4,000 employees will stay at the sprawling campus near Dulles airport, local officials acknowledge that the decision to relocate management to New York is a "symbolic blow to the region."
Indeed, the town of "Dulles," which is AOL's official mailing location, didn't really exist until the ailing online company rose to dominate Internet access in the U.S. in the late 1990s. Before AOL, nobody talked about Dulles as being anything other than an airport. The scenic region now known as Dulles used to be cow pasture and forests in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with nearby towns of Sterling and Herndon and Leesburg nothing more than charming and sleepy hamlets.
But AOL's rise turned the Dulles corridor into a concrete and six-lane highway hot-bed of tech start-ups and helped push out further the bounds of metro Washington. Now, with all the decision-makers located in New York, it's only a matter of time before Time Warner finds the bifurcated organization untenable and moves the rest of the operations to New York. (Assuming, of course, that AOL continues to even exist as a stand-alone entity and brand.)
Area officials are trying to spin this development in a more positive direction, but are having a difficult time doing so. Dorri O'Brien Morin, spokeswoman for Loudoun's Department of Economic Development said "It sounds like the sky is falling, but it's really not," Morin said.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:40 PM|Comments(0)
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