Bitly Poaches Top Exec From AOL's Patch as CEO

What's This?

By Seth Fiegerman2013-07-30 15:49:26 UTC

Four months after Bit.ly announced the resignation of CEO Peter Stern, the company has finally revealed a replacement: Mark Josephson.

Josephson currently serves as the head of revenue and marketing at Patch, AOL's struggling network of local news websites, where he has worked for more than two years. Josephson confirmed to Mashable that he put in his resignation at AOL within the last 30 days and will start full-time at Bit.ly on Sept. 1, though he is already spending some time in the office.

See also: Betaworks' Vision For the Future of Online News

"This year, my focus as CEO will be to make sure we have the right people and the right products to deliver on the promise of Bit.ly," Josephson told Mashable in an interview. That promise, he says, is to improve content sharing and analysis online. "I think it's logical to assume we are working to make our products better, particularly on the enterprise side."

Bit.ly, best known for its URL shortening service, is planning to double down on its paid offerings for publishers and brands to ramp up revenues. Bit.ly introduced a set of premium features several years ago that include branded URLs and a real-time analytics dashboard. Now, the company is beta testing a new paid product that shows customers which other sites their users visit, what types of content they're interested in and which content is starting to trend upwards.

When Stern resigned from the CEO role in March, multiple reports suggested it was the result Stern's desire for Bit.ly to be more of an ad tech business while others wanted it to be a data analysis tool for social media. Josephson would not comment on the disagreement, but it's clear from interviews that he and the company are pushing for the latter.

"Bit.ly has the largest data set about what's going on on the Internet," Sam Mandel, head of corporate development at Betaworks and the interim CEO at Bit.ly, told Mashable. He says that Bit.ly currently generates about 2 billion clicks per month and accounts for about 25% of all links shared on Twitter. "We really think Bit.ly has a great view into that data set. We think the value really comes from what we can do on top of that data set, what kind of intelligence we can provide."

Mandel says Josephson was an early favorite in the company's CEO search and that his hiring has "been in the works for awhile." This is in part because of Josephson's prior relationship with the team at Betaworks, the tech incubator that launched Bit.ly, as it invested in Outside.in — the startup he worked at prior to joining Patch.

In addition to hiring Josephson, Bit.ly also recently brought on a new chief revenue officer, Andrew Beranbom, to help the company boost sales. Mandel says Bit.ly's revenue is in the "mid-single digital millions" and growing consistently month-over-month.

Both execs will not only need to work to boost revenue, but also to retain top talent. In recent months, Bit.ly lost its head of consumer products, sales director and, earlier this week, its chief data scientist Hilary Mason.

Image: Mark Josephson

Topics: AOL, bit.ly, Business, patch, Startups