AOL's plan to cut up to 2,000 jobs, or a fifth of its workforce, to focus on becoming a leading online advertising platform faces some tough sledding out in the marketplace, given that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all larger than AOL and targeting the same market.
You can read the internal AOL memo here.
We're not sure how successful the move will be, but it will no doubt raise the in-houe profile of Truveo, the video search and destination site that AOL acquired in January 2006.
How to make money by placing search or display ads inside or alongside Web videos is a sort of Holy Grail of the moment that YouTube and a number of startups like Trueveo are gunning for.
Truveo re-launched as a consumer-focused site in August and yesterday inked a deal with Kewego, a whitel-label provider of European video content, that will syndicate European TV shows and related videos through Trueveo.
For an idea of how Truveo hopes to carve out its place in the video search pile, check out the pitch from Truveo founder Tim Tuttle, who explains how the servie is helping publishers add video content to their site, and also giving video producers more ways to syndicate their content across the Web.
