announced the relocation of one of its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York City and the combination of its advertising units into a new subsidiary called Platform A. This action followed several advertising acquisitions, most notably Advertising.com, and highlighted the company's new focus on advertising-driven business models. AOL management stressed that "significant operations" would remain in Dulles, which included the company's access services and modem banks. In October 2007, AOL announced the relocation of its other headquarters from Loudoun County, Virginia to New York City, while continuing to operate its Virginia offices. As part of the move to New York and the restructuring of responsibilities at the Dulles headquarters complex after the Reston move, Falco announced on October 15, 2007 plans to lay off 2,000 employees worldwide by the end of 2007, beginning "immediately." The result was a layoff of approximately 40% of AOL's employees. Most compensation packages associated with the October 2007 layoffs included a minimum of 120 days of severance pay, 60 of which were offered in lieu of the 60-day advance notice requirement by provisions of the 1988 federal WARN Act. By November 2007, AOL's customer base had been reduced to 10.1 million subscribers, slightly more than the number of subscribers of Comcast and AT&T Yahoo!. According to Falco, as of December 2007, the conversion rate of accounts from paid access to free access was more than 80%. On January 3, 2008, AOL announced the closing of its Reston, Virginia data center, which was sold to CRG West. On February 6, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that Time Warner would divide AOL's internet-access and advertising businesses, with the possibility of later selling the internet-access division. On March 13, 2008, AOL purchased the social networking site Bebo for $850m (£417m). On July 25, AOL announced that it was shuttering Xdrive, AOL Pictures and BlueString to save on costs and focus on its core advertising business. AOL Pictures was closed on December 31. On October 31, AOL Hometown (a web-hosting service for the websites of AOL customers) and the AOL Journal blog hosting service were eliminated. 2009–2015: As a digital media company On March 12, 2009, Tim Armstrong, formerly with Google, was named chairman and CEO of AOL. On May 28, Time Warner announced that it would position AOL as an independent company after Google's shares ceased at the end of the fiscal year. On November