AOL Archive

AOL has put out a press release today which shows significant growth in usage and advertising engagement for the aol.com site today. The release notes, "Since the homepage redesign was launched in September 2008, advertising click-through rates on the primary 300 x 250 ad banner rose 30%, according to internal metrics…In addition, the redesign is driving stronger consumer usage: total unique visitors and average daily visitors each are up 13%, and total minutes grew by 29%, compared to one year ago, according to the November 2008 comScore Media Metrix Report."

Congrats to AOL on the big usage improvements. Back in July I noted that AOL changed their client app and would enjoy a huge increase in pageviews due to the change. I use aol.com currently to check my AOL mail and I find that the page "clicks" an unbelievable amount of times on each pageload. Does this have anything to do with the increased stats? Doubt it, but there is one interesting thing to note. When you enter/exit AOL mail, it forces a view back to aol.com. There’s no way (at least that I can find) to engage with AOL mail without being forced back to aol.com after you complete your business.

Naturally this wouldn’t directly impact advertising click-through rates, it would certainly affect unique visitor and daily visitor counts. It’s a smart move for AOL – force as many users as you can to see as many pages with ads as possible.

AOL has announced the launch of their latest online content site today. Named PlaySavvy, the goal is to provide a resource for parents to help them figure out the world of console gaming (no online??). PlaySavvy is part of the GameDaily section of AOL’s content network.

Libe Goad, Editor-in-Chief, AOL PlaySavvy said, "Playing video games is one of the top pastimes for children these days, almost more than watching TV. We created AOL PlaySavvy to help parents navigate through all the gaming information out there in order to decide what’s appropriate for their children."

PlaySavvy contains content in the following categories: gaming 101 (all about games), FAQ (apparently with feedback from a parental gaming panel), gaming reviews from a parent’s perspective but with the kids in mind and how-to articles including how to talk to your kids about gaming.

The login functionality uses AOL ids and some of the content is provided by third-parties. While I can’t imagine this site doing massive pageviews, it could help keep parents inside the AOL content network longer which is a good thing for AOL. 

Search engines Yahoo and AOL have released their "2008 top searches" lists today. Check out the Yahoo and AOL year in review websites to view the full lists of all types of searches. Oops she did it again — Britney Spears leads on both search engines. Somehow Yahoo has Britney as the top overall search but not the top search in the celebrity category?

Here’s the lists from the News category:

Some other fun bits….

• How to tie a tie = most popular how-to search on AOL
• AOL says Las Vegas was the most searched U.S. city for travel – NYC placed 5th
• Yahoo shows Jamie Lynn Spears moving up in the celebrity category – hey a teenage pregnancy and a baby daddy will do it every time!
• In Yahoo’s "influential women" category – mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano beat out Michelle Obama
• Heath Ledger and Bernie Mac lead Yahoo’s dead people category

AOL has announced the launch of a new flash-based instant messaging application today. AIM Express allows you to do everything you can in the normal AIM client inside of a Web browser. In my testing this morning, I found it to work very well. As you chat with more people, tabs show up on the top of the application so you can jump back and forth. Everything is contained inside of the one Flash application.

I wonder if they could port this to a desktop app using Adobe AIR as it would allow everything to be contained inside the app instead of opening windows for each current chat. The new AIM Express also allows for text messaging using SMS for friends that are offline.

AOL also announced the launch of an updated Windows Mobile client. The new client includes ads from AOL’s Platform-A division.

Other companies in the Web IM and chat space include current CN sponsor eBuddy and Meebo.

AOL has announced this morning that through their Platform-A online advertising brand, they will bring together buy.at and Goowy Media. buy.at is an affiliate network with partners including Blockbuster and Ticketmaster. Goowy Media provides a widget platform and also powers the yourminis Webtop. This new offering will take the buy.at network and Goowy’s technology to create a new set of monetizable widgets that publishers can place on their Web sites and blogs.

The first company to use the new affiliate widget setup is Ticketmaster. The widget is named "EventEngine" and will allow for customization of specific events.

AOL acquired Goowy in February of 2008 and buy.at also in early 2008. I still believes that widgets will change the advertising landscape this year.

AOL has announced the launch of a new blog under their AOL Latino division. Fánaticos is a spanish-language blog focused on sports content including: football/soccer, baseball and boxing from the United States, Mexico, Latin America and Spain. Ads will come from AOL’s Platform-A ad division. In my testing this morning, all of the ads were in English, but the content is in Spanish. If the site is geared towards Spanish speakers, it seems like the click rates would be pretty low if the ads continue to be served in English. The ads did appear like remnant CPM ads so Platform-A probably doesn’t care since the ads are impression-based.

AOL has brought together nine sports bloggers as the initial content team members. Content from other AOL properties will be added over the coming months including a Truveo video search. There’s also an Olympics section which appears to drive users back to the main AOL Latino Web site.

AOL has apparently had a round of cuts and changes in their blog network which began last month. Interesting to see AOL launch a new blog when some writers may be writing for free.

Matt Marshall at VentureBeat is reporting that AOL is closing their Tacoda behavioral targeting division and merging the customers into Advertising.com. Advertising.com is part of AOL’s overall Platform-A advertising platform. Marshall has posted an email that AOL sent to Tacoda publishers informing them of the change.

One thing I note is that while Marshall notes that publishers will be pushed into Advertising.com, the email also mentions, "Your advertising.com representative…will follow up with you next week to discuss your inventory monetization options moving forward." This looks like there’s no guarantee what the publishers will end up with.

David Kaplan at PaidContent spoke with Lynda Clarizio, president of Platform-A. Clarizio disagrees with some of the statements that Marshall made on the VentureBeat piece. Clarizio says the behavioral targeting pricing is the same on Tacoda and Advertising.com. Kaplan has a good look at Tacoda and the changes since they were acquired by AOL a year ago.

As a side note, everyone I know using Advertising.com is happy when they get a campaign paying a dollar cpm.