Online Bussiness | AOL 25th Anniversary and Content Strategy

25May/10Off

AOL 25th Anniversary and Content Strategy

There's a long way to go: In the most recent quarter, AOL's sites attracted 2.9 percent of the display ad market, behind Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Fox, according to Comscore.
The business of online advertising is a tough one, as newspaper owners have learned in the past decade. Margins are thinner online than in print, where scarcity of ad space allowed for much higher rates. The Internet offers infinite space and endless content, driving down ad rates.
AOL thinks it has a solution. Rather than just creating news sites that cover the story of the day, it is using Internet usage data to create content on subjects for which people are searching. If news about the latest American Idol castoff is pulling in lots of users, AOL's sites will create more content about it. The more pages AOL creates, the more pages users see, and the more ads it can sell.
But to prevail, analysts say, AOL must create a lot of that content cheaply. To that end, it has started Seed.com, which pays up to $50 per news article to anyone who can reliably string sentences together. AOL fuses that content with its professional, higher-cost content.
For example, a writer could earn $20 by submitting at least 15 quotes of dialogue from the movie MacGruber, which might be used on moviefone.com. Or one could collect $50 by contributing Real Stories From Men Who Have Been Cheated On, the best of which might appear on AOL's men's site, Asylum.com. "What happened, what did it feel like, how did you react and most importantly, what did you learn?" the assignment says. "You must include a photograph of yourself or your submission will not be considered."

-Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post

"Sure, it will be around for a long time," AOL co-founder Steve Case says. "The question is, how do you return it to being a leader. I think (AOL CEO) Tim (Armstrong) is on the right track."
Adds Armstrong: "The AOL brand is still one of the most meaningful in Internet history. In many cases, it was (people's) first (experience) online."
America Online took consumers by storm in the 1990s as a dial-up Internet company. During its heyday, it helped redefine how people communicate, ushering in an era of PCs with built-in modems and chat-room conversations. It was even the subject of a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy, You've Got Mail, in 1998.
The advent of search engines meant more competition, offering consumers a cornucopia of other content-based sites. "The growth of search engines opened up the Internet, and made it OK to leave the walled garden of an AOL for safer alternatives," Lim says.
And yet, AOL remains one of the most recognizable brands in the world and a big draw. It ranked No. 5, in traffic, among all U.S. Web properties in April, with 115 million unique visitors, according to market researcher ComScore. (Google was No. 1, with 176 million unique visitors.)

-Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

Anyway AOL, which started as America OnLine is still alive if not well. Of course, you would never know that by looking at Google's main search page. Google had that excellent tribute to Pac-Man the other day. But for AOL.... (cue the crickets.)
AOL's slide from once being the hottest company on the Internet to being seen as a dinosaur is one of the most stunning Icarus stories in the annals of American business.

-Frank James, NPR

AOL turned 25 today, prompting Chief Executive Tim Armstrong to make the rounds with co-founder Steve Case to celebrate the milestone.
When asked about advertising opportunities going forward during an interview today, Armstrong relayed this story –days after upbeat broadcast executives unveiled their prime time programming to advertisers known as the upfronts.
Case, who is now the chairman and CEO of Revolution, added that more and more people are spending time online at the expense of reading magazines and newspapers or watching TV. ”Obviously advertising is going to track that audience not just the number of people using it but the amount of time they are using it. You can debate how quickly that will happen but you can’t debate inevitably the dollars will shift towards the digital medium because that is where consumer attention has shifted.”
All true as more people turn online to get part of their media fix. Consumers, however, aren’t exactly lingering at content sites either. The average time spent for users at AOL News was 16 minutes and 49 seconds for the month of March, according to Nielsen Online. (The average time spent during the same month was 14 minutes and 32 seconds at Yahoo, roughly 26 minutes at CNN, and almost 15 minutes at NYTimes.com)

-blogs.reuters.com

Armstrong, in an interview with the CNBC television channel, said the first phase of the Internet was about "access" -- an area where AOL was a Web pioneer with its dial-up connection business.
"The second phase has really been about the platforms -- the Googles, the Facebooks," he said.
"We see the Internet as a big open pipe that could be filled with a lot better and more high-quality content," he told CNBC. "And that's really our plan, to put technology and journalism together."
With Patch.com, Armstrong said AOL had dispatched full-time journalists to about 50 towns across the United States to provide local news coverage and "we're going to go to hundreds of towns this year."
"We have probably hired more journalists on a global basis than any other organization has," Armstrong said.
AOL has also launched Seed.com to recruit freelance writing talent to crank out stories for its array of websites on topics ranging from pets and sports to politics and technology.

-Fairfax Media

GHTime Code(s): de74b

Popularity: unranked [?]