AOL

AOL is announcing a new partnership with CBS today and the re-launch of its AOL Radio destination site. Over 350 radio channels are available including 200 CBS channels and 200 AOL radio channels plus user-generated custom channels.

The new player works on both Mac and PC, create preset channels and click back to the last 30 songs you've listened to. You can also share songs with friends and run a mini-player inside of AIM.

As of April 2008, comScore ranks AOL radio as the most trafficked radio site online.

NYC's 1010 WINS is one of the new stations available on AOL Radio. Growing up, this was the only station that worked on the shower radio - everyday I heard "you give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world." I wonder if it's still 22 minutes today.

At last nights NY Video 2.0 Meetup, AOL demo'ed their new video portal. While some of the content is AOL-specific, most of the videos listed come from other video sites including YouTube. A few questions were asked of the speaker regarding payment to the content producer and the video hoster. He noted that he is a product guy not a finance guy so we did not get any answers. Then there was a discussion about what AOL gives to the video hosting site, it seems to be that they send traffic to them. Or do they?

When Shay from Kaltura presented, he started by sharing a popular ratio, "1% produce 9% might comment, 89% sit back and watch". So this means that 89% just watch. So if someone finds a video from XYZ producer that is hosted on YouTube, but embedded into AOL, what does YouTube really get out of the transaction if the user only watches?

I am not picking on AOL, just using them as an example as it's the most recent one for me. Lots of video sites are doing this. And my question is when are the video hosting companies (YouTube, Viddler, etc.) going to look to monetize the embed?

Let's think about it. I upload a video to YouTube. YouTube displays it. 100 sites embed it and then monetize the page that my video is on. Since we know that most will watch but not go to YouTube, what does YT get in this overall transaction?

My guess is that we will start to see ads within the embeddable players by years end (actually 3Q seems reasonable). Frankly AOL should be returning a portion of their income to the video creator and to the hosting service. So AOL has two choices I see for this future embeddable player:

1. Pay the video hosting service a fee to provide the player on their site
2. Allow ads within the embeddable player

I see non-commercial sites still being able to offer the player at no cost or advertising. Am I offbase? Remember to think with a financial mindset where companies (not mom's blog) need to make a profit to continue operations.

Could the same thing happen with RSS? Maybe.

AOL has moved their local search into Beta mode tonight. And I have to give it to them, it's pretty slick. They are using Mapquest on the mapping technology and as I have said a billion times already this year, Local is where it's at.

What I really like about it is how it refreshes the local options as you move around the map. So start in 10036 (Times Square) and move to 11235 (Brooklyn) and the options move with you. I don't think Google even does that!

Ratings come from users on AOL Local and the maps and results come quick. Of course, this type of local search would be great on Yelp! Come inside for a screenshot...

I realized something was up when I logged into AOL today. I have been an AOL customer since 1993 and always kept the account for two reasons; the ability to check client web sites using the AOL browser (before it become standard) and because my AOL email address still is the main hub for some of my ecommerce activities.

AOL has always featured a start page when you sign on to AOL. When they created a new start page for AOL.com, I knew it wouldn't be long before that was on the AOL service as well. Took longer than I expected, but it is here. This should provide a bit of cost savings for AOL as they won't have to manage two start pages. So in summary, the new AOL main service start page is now the same as AOL.com. Screenshot after the click.

Received this news from AOL this morning that they have placed plans to acquire TradeDoubler for SEK 6,332 million or about US $900 million. The Offer Price represents a premium of 20% over the average stock price for TradeDoubler. AOL is anticipating closing the deal by end of February 2007.

Tara Connor has brought so much joy to so many during her run this year as Miss USA. And today she brought me a lot of joy. The story I wrote about her yesterday with her becoming the Digg Spam Queen 2006 has become amazingly popular in the search engines. So Tara, thank you... it's just too bad that we meet on such unfortunate circumstances for you.

Google released its top searches today. So I thought it might be fun to do some charts showing Yahoo!, Google and AOL in several categories. I think the 2003-2006 Google/Yahoo! charts are interesting to show what we humans searched on. Though I think maybe something changed in their counts because after 2004 the celebs seem to be missing. Entertainment dominates on the Yahoo! multi-year chart. Clearly Britney Spears is the most popular search of all time. And this year she was worried that she might lose her top spot on AOL, so she decided to drop K-Fed and start "going out."

Come inside and check out the discussion that the new Hollywood trio (Lohan/Hilton/Spears) had in their Bentleys!

AOL has released their top searches for 2006 list, shortly after Yahoo! released theirs. There are some similarities, and some differences.

For example, Yahoo! lists Britney as the number one most searched term, AOL lists "weather" as its top term. I think what this list shows is that AOL users are not as "entertainment" oriented as the general mass as reported by Yahoo!.

So which celeb was number one most searched on AOL? What about the top searched gadget? Pokemon was the 8th most popular television show search. Debra Lafave, the teacher took 8th place in news searches for 2006.

AOL launches a set of political blogs geared towards the elections this year - isn't it a bit late?

AOL has released some great data from a survey they ran about online video and users of online video. The full release can be found on the AOL news site.