AOL's accounting under fire
Reuters | at | by Mike
America Online Inc. boosted its revenue figures through unconventional deals from 2000 to 2002, before and after its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., the Washington Post reported on Thursday. A chart printed in conjunction with the Post article shows a total of $270.1 million in unconventional deals.
The newspaper said it reviewed hundreds of pages of confidential AOL documents and interviewed current and former company officials and their business partners to produce the report. In October 2000, the Post said, just a week before AOL President Robert Pittman publicly denied that AOL was feeling an industry-wide slowdown in advertising, shares of Yahoo! Inc. YHOO.O tumbled 21 percent after that company, a key AOL competitor, said that strong ad growth could not be sustained. What's more, AOL's shares lost 17 percent the day before Pittman spoke, apparently on similar worries, the Post said.