A Conversation with Ziv Navoth

An article by Ayelet Noff    4 Comments

AOL sure is in an interesting place these days. They have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP – Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business (that more than twenty years after it was launched) still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups; 1) Platform A which is one of largest advertising networks 2) Media Glow which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget plus 3) The group which most interests me; People Networks which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.

People Networks are now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also 3^rd party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth SVP for Marketing and Partnerships at AOL.  Ziv is an extremely interesting guy. While running marketing at Bebo, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition his task at AOL has been to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him below.