AOL packs its bags for Manhattan, emphasizes focus on advertising
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The online service-turned media company will be Silicon Alley's latest emigre, taking up space new New York University.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL plans to strengthen its online advertising business by acquiring Tacoda, a company that specializes in delivering ads based on users' online activities. AOL entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Tacoda, whose "behavioral targeting" technology will complement AOL's online advertising services, the companies announced Tuesday. AOL and Tacoda didn't disclose details of the transaction, which will close after customary approvals are obtained. AOL, which is owned by Time Warner, is in a so far successful, years-longÂ transition from a subscription-fee based business to an advertising-based business. Like Google, Yahoo, and other major Internet players, AOL is busy boosting its capabilities to provide a variety of online advertising services, including search, video, syndicated, mobile, and graphical ads. In order to capitalize on theÂ fast-growing online ad market, AOL, Yahoo, Google and others have resorted to purchasing online ad services companies. For example,Â Google is in the process of buying DoubleClickÂ for $3.1 billion, whileÂ Yahoo recently closed its acquisition of Right Media. In May, Microsoft announced its intention toÂ buy digital marketing services provider aQuantiveÂ for $6 billion. Meanwhile,Â AOL acquired Third Screen MediaÂ and AdTechÂ this year, and Lightningcast last year. The U.S. online advertising market grew 35 percent in 2006 over 2005, the fourth straight year of expansion for this market, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Marketers spent almost $17 billion advertising on U.S. Web sites in 2006, according to the IAB. Tacoda, founded in 2001, is based in New York and will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL. It has about 100 employees and more than 4,000 Web sites in its ad network. Its publishing clients include The New York Times Co. and NBC Universal.
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AOL yesterday said it is buying its fourth online advertising company of the year, part of an ongoing effort to transform itself into an Internet advertising concern.
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AOL looks a lot like Yahoo these days and a few goodies, once reserved for paying members, are especially attractive now.
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Time Warner Inc.'s  AOL on  Wednesday said it will give away e-mail, software and other Web  services for free to high-speed Internet users in a bid to  boost online advertising sales.
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After spending the last few years in a whirlwind of activity that, in the end, got it just as far along as if it had been in limbo, a kick in the tail by new Time Warner CEO Bewkes has AOL back in gear, with a mobile premiere for its new ad platform.
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AOL is rumored to be close to a deal with Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising startup, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company had previously been in talks with Microsoft over a possible deal.
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AOL will reorganize its business   divisions to simplify its structure as it focuses on boosting   Internet advertising sales globally, according to a memorandum   sent to employees on Wednesday.
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AOL, the world's largest internet services provider, is to split into four separate divisions to cut red tape and boost profits.
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The âI Love New Yorkâ campaign has finally moved into the digital world.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL has integrated its various ad networks into a single platform that it hopes will jumpstart its online advertising business, whose weak growth in the second quarter has led to sharp criticism of this Time Warner subsidiary. On Monday, AOL announced that the integrated ad platform, called Platform A, meshes Advertising.com, Tacoda, Third Screen Media, Lightningcast, and AdTech. AOL also announced it will move its headquarters from Dulles, Virginia, to New York City, in order to be physically at the center of the U.S. advertising industry. However, the announcement comes at a time when questions about AOL's strategy and performance are at a high point. In August, when Time Warner issued its second-quarter financial report, some observers were surprised that AOL's online ad revenue grew only 16 percent during the quarter, well below the industry average. In the first quarter, online ad spending in the U.S. was up 26 percent year on year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, spending grew 35 percent over 2005. AOL in recent years has been transitioning its business model from one based on subscription fees to one based on online advertising. Toward that end, it has made almost all of its content and services freely available on the Web and discarded its "walled garden" approach. Until the second quarter, AOL's online ad growth had either been in line with the industry average or exceeded it, justifying the strategy change. But the quarter's results led some financial analysts to openly question if AOL can successfully pull off its transformation into an online ad-supported business. Time Warner has been investing in AOL's online ad platform. In 2004, AOL acquired Advertising.com, a provider of online marketing services to publishers and advertisers, and last yearÂ it bought Lightningcast, a broadband video advertising specialist. This year,Â AOL snapped up Third Screen MediaÂ to boost its mobile advertising services, and also acquired AdTech for its ad-serving and marketing campaign-management platform. Most recently,Â it bought Tacoda, which specializes in delivering ads based on users' online activities, an area known as "behavioral targeting." With Platform A's unveiling on Monday and the move to Manhattan, AOL executives are convinced that the subsidiary will get its online ad business back on track. AOL is no stranger to corporate shakeups and reorganizations. Almost a year ago today, it announced a significant realignment of its internal business structure, only to see its then-CEO and Chairman Jonathan Miller get his walking papers two months later. Miller's replacement, Randy Falco, unveiled major changes to Miller's plan in mid-December amidst a shakeup that saw several high-ranking executives head out the door. Separately on Monday, AOL also announced an agreement with HP to offer co-branded, localized versions of AOL's portal, toolbar and search engine on HP desktop and notebook PCs sold worldwide. The agreement extends and expands an existing relationship between the companies of a co-branded AOL-HP portal as the default home page in HP consumer PCs sold in the U.S.
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AOL said Friday that it signed a multiyear marketing and technology partnership with Kayak Software to build its own site to enter the big business of online travel.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL needs all the Internet traffic it can get, but it is struggling with the fading popularity of Netscape.com, for many years one of the Web's most popular destinations. AOL doesn't break out how much Netscape.com contributes to its revenue but calls the property a valuable one. "Netscape has a loyal community of users and is an important part of the AOL Network," an AOL spokeswoman said. Soon, AOL will restore Netscape.com to a traditional Web portal format, 15 months afterÂ turning it into a social news site, a change that, instead of boosting the site's popularity, hurt it. Still, one can't blame AOL for the attempt to give Netscape.com a new lease on life as a Web 2.0 site. Traffic to the site had been on a years-long slide. This raises the question: Will switching Netscape.com back into a portal turn the tide? With AOL fighting tooth and nail for every online ad dollar, the performance of the once mighty Netscape.com matters. "If you have a brand that has some cachet or currency and carries recognition, it's logical to use it," said James Goss, a financial analyst with Barrington Research. Still, Netscape.com's past glories will not magically draw people back to it. "It's probably not worthwhile to invest heavily on the site unless they have a coherent strategic plan for it," said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. AOL has bet the farm on online advertising as it sheds its old subscription-fee business model. It's a years-long process that continues full-speed ahead withÂ this week's announcement of AOL's plan to move its headquarters to Manhattan and the integration of its ad networks into a single platform. But with its online ad revenue growth a disappointing 16 percent in the second quarter, AOL could sure use the traffic that Netscape.com used to draw even several years ago. An examination of Netscape.com's traffic patterns since AOL acquired Netscape Communications in March 1999 for $4.2 billion tells a story of consistent decline. As critics have pointed out over the years, this is true not only for the Netscape.com portal but also for the company's other products, in particular its browser. "AOL has never known what to do with Netscape. They squandered that asset," Sterling said. "Eventually, the bottom dropped out." In November 1999, Netscape.com had 20.8 million unique visitors in the U.S., reaching close to a third of the country's Internet users, according to comScore. By December 2003, Netscape.com's unique visitors had dropped to 18.8 million, and its reach had plummeted to 12.4 percent of the U.S.'s Internet users, according to comScore. Things kept deteriorating, and by January 2005, Netscape.com had little over 17.5 million unique visitors and a reach of 11 percent. In the next nine months, Netscape.com suffered a massive drop in unique visitors. In October 2005, the portal had 12.9 million unique visitors, and its reach among all Internet users in the U.S. -- 169 million at that point -- had fallen to 8 percent. This page-view graph, based on data compiled by Alexa Internet, shows the erosion in Netscape.com's traffic between early 2002 and today. "It's an interesting illustration of the waning of a very strong Internet brand," Sterling said. As tragic as 2005's traffic numbers look compared with what Netscape.com had been, they would probably elicit tears of joy from AOL officials today. In August 2007, Netscape.com drew 6.1 million unique visitors, down from 10 million in August 2006, according to comScore. The AOL spokeswoman said part of the traffic erosion of the past year is due to the fact that starting in the third quarter of 2006, Netscape Mail was migrated to AIM Mail so Netscape.com lost those visits. Also, in October 2006, the site lost the traffic from the Netscape Connect dial-up access service, which was broken out into its own property. She couldn't quantify how many unique visits the loss of those two components cost Netscape.com, but it's probably fair to say that AOL had much higher expectations for the site's traffic after its social news transformation. Netscape.com drew 61 percent fewer visits in August of this year than in August of last year, a period when visits to social news rival Digg.com increased 142 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd. In other words, the problem hasn't been the social news format, which lets readers submit and share links to stories as well as vote on, comment on, and rank those articles. Netscape.com simply didn't gain the expected traction with people who frequent these sites. AOL acknowledged this when it announced the plan to turn Netscape.com into a portal again. AOL isn't giving up on the social news site now housed at Netscape.com. Last week, AOL announced that the social news site will be rebaptized Propeller and moved to Propeller.com. However, Propeller could face an uphill branding battle, considering the history of its Web address. According to cached pages found at the Internet Archive, Propeller.com belonged to PropHead Development, which specialized in digital set-top boxes. PropHead was acquired by AOL Time Warner -- now known as Time Warner Inc., parent company of AOL -- in 2000. Archive.org's last cached snapshot for the Propeller.com address dates from January 2002. At press time, Propeller.com is empty of content. As a portal, Netscape.com will feature news articles handpicked by its editors instead of visitors, along with a search engine and links to AOL and Netscape services and content. Netscape.com's forthcoming format is at an alternate address. Basically, it looks a lot like it did before its social news transformation. One change: AOL plans to establish links between Netscape.com and Propeller.com. It remains to be seen if the latest plan to revitalize the once mighty Netscape.com will propel it to new heights or see it sputter into oblivion. What's clear is that AOL once had a portal jewel in its hands. "AOL really wasted an opportunity when they bought Netscape. They didn't do enough to leverage the site's traffic and brand. They basically sat on it. It was a strategic blunder," Sterling said.
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AOL said on Monday it has realigned  its advertising business and expanded a deal with  Hewlett-Packard Co  beyond the United States, as part of  a move to take its properties and services into more than 30  countries in two years.
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America Online has had quite a bit of success with its AIM Robot (AIMBot) technology, including one that feeds users news headlines or on-demand news from the Wall Street
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Time Warner Inc.&#39;s America Online Inc. is planning to debut a free search engine for comparing travel deals with the help of Norwalk, Conn.
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DULLES - Short text advertisements touting AOL products and services are being tacked on to certain e-mail messages sent from AOL accounts.