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When you think about advertisements, it makes sense that they want to hold and retain our attention.

On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.

I don't want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I'm very aware that there's multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don't want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.

Advertising and content have always been bound together - in print, on television, and on the web. Sure, you can skip the ad - just flip the page, or press 'ffwd' on your DVR. But great advertising, as I've long argued, adds value to the content ecosystem, and has as much a right to be in the conversation as does the publisher and the consumer.

It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.

Think of any news site on the web that sells subscriptions; AOL has four times as many people as the largest subscription service. We have people who pay to use our products and services, and they are heavily engaged in our content.

Put simply, my vision for AOL is to build the largest and most sophisticated global advertising network while we grow the size and engagement of our worldwide audience.

One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we're already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them.

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.