AOL cuts 900 jobs in the US and India

Ailing media giant AOL is to cut 900 jobs in the US and India, accounting for roughly one in five of its entire workforce. Staff numbers were cut by a third 18 months ago.

Once the world's largest internet service provider, AOL has struggled in recent years to remake itself as an online content portal. Most recently, the company agreed to a $315m merger with news site The Huffington Post.

In a company memo obtained by news site Business Insider, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong said that the moves were a "critical step" in remaking the company.

"Today is a day that represents a step toward the future, but also a day where change will cause an impact across our team," he wrote.

"AOL remains in the middle of the disruption that the internet is causing and we are starting to move from being a disrupted brand to a brand that is leading the disruption."

Enderle Group principal analyst Rob Enderle said that the move represents a logical step in the integration between AOL and The Huffington Post as the company looks to shift its focus and accommodate the new business.

"It sounds like they may be shifting resources someplace else," Enderle told V3.co.uk.

"Typically when you have a merger of two like entities, you're going to lose some people because you are going to drop some redundancies."

Overall, Enderle approved of the AOL-Huffington Post merger, pointing to The Huffington Post's founder Ariana Huffington's established position in the online content market that AOL covets.

"AOL was in the process of transitioning to where Huffington already was," he said. "The two companies together make AOL much stronger."