AOL chairman and Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong speaks at the Reuters Global Media Summit in New York
Following the news of AOL's sale to Verizon, AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong held an all-hands meeting with staffers Monday morning. While many have reported ad tech as the driver behind the deal, Armstrong emphasized content to a room filled with HuffPost writers, AOL sales execs and other employees. Reuters

AOL is set to announce a layoff of 40 employees, including the team working on the AOL Instant Messenger Service, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Senior Vice-President of business operations Eric van Miltenburg and AIM head Jason Shellen too will leave the organization, following the mass job cuts.

Bloomberg also reported that David Tempkin, who presently runs the mobile group, is set to take over as Head of the Consumer Applications division.

Faced with the decline in sales, AOL is taking steps to decrease costs. The fourth quarter earnings declared by AOL in February showed that there was a decline by 66 percent compared to last year. Also the revenue declined to $2.2 billion last year, which was down 9 percent from the $2.4 billion it made in 2010.

The company has suffered the reputation of being outdated for sometime now and Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, who took up the position in March 2009, is hard at work to change that. One major initiative he has taken is to buy smaller companies. As an important move, AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million in February 2011.

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