Kate Burns has stepped down as head of AOL Europe, and has been replaced by Goviral chairman and co-founder Jimmy Maymann.
Goviral is a unit of AOL’s Advertising.com and has been a bright spot in its ad business.
Goviral’s CEO René Rechtman will now serve as the new head of the European Advertising.com Group.
Burns joined AOL in mid-2009 from its social networking subsidiary Bebo as head of European ad sales, going on to take responsibility for UK operations in 2010.
In 2001, Burns joined Google as Director, UK, Ireland and Benelux, notably as its first employee outside the US and was responsible for driving Google’s international success.
An AOL spokesperson said Burns “had made a personal decision to leave AOL to spend more time with her family and personal pursuits”.
“Two years ago Kate came on board as SVP sales and chief executive of the European operations and her focus was to turn the business around.
“In that short time and ahead of schedule she has successfully refocused efforts, established a strong leadership team and scaled the business’ operations structure.
“To best support the changes to the UK and Europe business we can confirm we have formalised an operation structure we believe will continue to support the execution of AOL strategy.”
Burns does not seem to have immediate plans and will stay at the company until the end of October.
Maymann reports to Ned Brody, who was recently named AOL’s sales head and Chief Revenue Officer.
According to an internal memo, he will head the Huffington Post owned-and-operated businesses for both Europe and Latin America. The Huffington Post unit has taken over all of AOL’s content businesses.
