AOL’s programming sites (Money & Finance, News, Sports, Health, Food, Music, Games, and Moviefone, among others) hit an all time high in high in unique visitors and traffic in March, the company says. Page views to the sites are up 35% over the last year and unique visitors up 11% to 56 million (AOL as a whole draws 209 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore).
As a whole, the properties have had six consecutive months of unique visitor and page view growth.
Why the surge? AOL attributes it to a year long rebranding and redesign effort, noting that every key vertical site has been redesigned (see our coverage of AOL Finance, for example, and the almost immediate traffic surge that followed).
Many of the programming sites have dropped the AOL brand altogether. We wrote recently about the launch of Switched, their technology network. Black Voices, an African American culture and news site, and Asylum, a men-focused site, are other examples.
AIM, MapQuest, AOL Music, AOL Television, Black Voices, TMZ and Asylum are No. 1 in their respective categories, based on unique visitor counts from Comscore. AOL Money & Finance, Real Estate, Moviefone, Women, Health and AOL Latino are all in the top three spots compared to competitors.
Also see news of AOL’s acquisition today of fantasy sports site Fleaflicker, which it is integrating into AOL Sports.
AOL is monetizing all of this content through Platform-A, which recently became the top U.S. advertising network by reach. In March 170,537 U.S. Internet users (91% of the total audience) visited a site represented by Platform-A. Yahoo and Google, by contrast, reached just 85% and 81%, respectively. More on AOL’s advertising plans here.
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China presence?
AOL is hungry and sick of being kicked around. It shows in their new products. Good for them.
AOL is focusing on the local presence and as in its name America online, I think it was pretty sure that they will rise, and now they have. AOL is now also focusing to develop local presence in other countries too. May be they will also capture enough market there too.
nice top image. anyone else notice the big bold word?
Jason - ummm, yeah. I honestly didn’t see that. Just took a screen shot of the home page.
with those figures I would not be suprised if MS or Google will start looking.
Also maybe Yahoo and CNET should at what they are doing…
AOL is no longer known by America online for a while?.. they certainly have very successful intl jv’s like aol.de, aol.fr, aol.jp etc., and just reinvented aol.hk this month (after the previously failed http://www.aol.com.hk launched circa the turn of the millennium…
As I recalled, Google bought shares of AOL a while ago right? Have this resulted in the increase of unique visitors? How does Google plan to maximize the value of AOL or integrate AOL in their plan?
Has this effect trickled down to AOL search.
As of a few month ago, ASK had replaced them in 5th place
{seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/sRMgFQBdZE_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”House ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/1e1knoBdSS”}}}
Kudos to AOL — they have been kicked while down for a while —- I am a user of their new Health site as well as Food, Music and News. I find them to be better then yahoo or msn in almost all categories. Great to see others of users are also noticing that they have turned it around.
I use AOL Sport’s Fanhouse site all the time now — they have the best sports content updated all day long — great to hear they bought Fleaflicker as it is a great Fantasy site. Surprised to see AOL has grown so much as the press makes it seem like they are dead. good for them. keep fanhosue coming - Stephen
http://www.tech-exposed.com
Good for AOL but I’m not sure how far they’re efforts will get them. We’ll haqve to closely watch to see if all of these efforts were correct.
One “S” in “Asylum”, Michael.
35% growth in page views and over 10% in Unique Visitors — that is impressive any way you slice it. Did anyone see this coming from AOL?
AOL News is my go to news site since they overhauled it last year. I switched from Yahoo News. Great to see others are also recognizing he innovation that is taking place at AOL. I just downloaded aol’s iphone apps for Finance and Moviefone — they are featured on the apple site http://www.apple.com/webapps/e.....x_top.html
Interesting. Growing Audience for AOL’s premium content coupled with Platform A. I get it. Should be interesting as it relates to Yahoo, MSFT, Google.
How has Yahoo and MSN traffic been to their premium content over the last year? Michael, do you know? That would be interesting to see if AOL is stealing share - Alan
AOL’s platform A isn’t really newly on top. It’s just newly tracked by comScore. AOL’s Advertising.com has been on the top for at least two years I believe.
Agree — the promise of Platform A with growing audience in key content areas..very interesting. What does this mean for Yahoo?
AOL’s Finance site has clearly stepped up the game. Relegence powered Real Time News is extremely valuable and steps up the game for Yahoo Finance. Their iphone Finance app is the best yet
AOL is over. Nothing but newbie land. I think posts like this are what earned you the title “the stupidest man in the blogosphere” over at upstartblogger.com.
http://www.upstartblogger.com/.....logosphere
When it comes to news coverage in the black community, AOL’s Black Voices is definitely one of the best.
As a media buyer AOL’s women’s sites are the richest in my view - Stylelist, Food, etc.. They are actually closing in on iVillage if you look at Comscore data.
Adam - if AOL is over why is their traffic of new users growing double digit?
Let’s not forget best-in-class blogs such as http://www.engadget.com, http://www.joystiq.com, http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com, http://www.ps3fanboy.com
“Asylum” has only one “s”, but you got the link right.
I checked out the blog and I’m thrilled that they’re using my old Blogsmith platform. The deeper I get into it though, the more I think it should have been called Assylum.
You know, AOL’s free webmail service is actually pretty slick: very fast loading, full-featured, free IMAP, etc. There’s only two things holding it back: 1) all the ads, and 2) the stigma of having an “aol.com” e-mail address. Web veterans seem to make fun of people using an aol.com e-mail address.
I know I’ll be in the minority here, but I think Yahoo and AOL would be a good fit. It wouldn’t necessarily bring either tons of new users, but it would really strengthen their offerings. Together AOL and Yahoo own some of the best sites on the web.
hey mike, how come no cnet earnings story this quarter? you guys went out of your way to report disappointing quarters earlier. could it be because the report was good and there’s a yahoo deal to boot? LOL
AOL is starting to make a small come back… i hope they keep improving their services.
The content side of the business is doing well, however I’m not so sure how well the advertising side of the business is doing -especially with all the turnover at Platform-A
Roger if you like AOL’s iPhone apps then you should also take a look at it’s Search product on the iPhone. It has received terrific reviews.
Go to search.aol.com on the iPhone.
This is definitely a company on fire.
Aptimus is monetizing a number of the sites for AOL as well. This can be clearly seen in AIM download process. Is Platform A going to kick them out of the AOL properties?
AOL has been criticized by every tom-dick-harry for their change of direction. But this story now is real. Watch out M$ and Y! Look who is catching up, FAST!
http://techwatch.reviewk.com/2.....ts-plan-b/
Um, a “major rebranding and redesign?” All they did was completely copy Yahoo’s home page and change the colors. Even the vertical sites look the same. Not sure why that took an entire year. Even funnier that no one seems to notice it…
WOW! AOL SHILL Central! It all started at 4:48 am and finished at 6:05am. I had a few extra minutes to kill, so I compiled a small list of the probable suspects:
#11, #12 (Debbie, Stephen)- both list the AOL properties they use and then noting how well AOL is doing contrary to popular belief (8 minutes apart); note the single name/ no link.
#15, #20, #23 (EddieF, EvanT, DanielS)- all three noting how AOL has “stepped up their game” or otherwise improved while citing stats that seem like a product manager’s intimate knowledge; note the first name/ first letter, last name (not common around the TC comments sections).
#16, #17, #19 (RogerTenner, ALanWright, ScottLanter)- all thrree praising AOL sites and comparing to Yahoo, et al. One, even links to apple’s iphone app site where the AOL product is featured; note the CamelCaps in all names (again, not usual in TC comment section).
#32 I’m with you. My first time on the new layout I thought I WAS on Yahoo.
Frank-
I left a positive comment about AOL. Am I an AOL employee? Investor? Bot?
None of the above, but I recognize that some of their properties are very strong.
Bashing AOL is so five years ago. They deserved every bit of the bashing back then right up until about a year ago. Now it seems they’re making smart decisions, creating compelling vertical sites, and generally making progress on turning the company around.
I used to hate AOL as much as the next guy, but I got to give credit where credit is due.
There’s an inside story here. As far back as 2002, some product-people inside AOL programming had been pushing for changes in the branding strategy — but senior-levels at TW always mandated a very strong, consistent AOL brand (and programming voice). It was typical “states rights” issue — with AOL was the destination; while TV, Music, Movies, etc. were just content offerings. Speculation was that a strong AOL brand would add value to the stock, and help AOL navigate the politics on TW’s board. Past financial reliance on the AOL Welcome Screen fueled the fire, since funneling all users through a front door created a lot of ad revenue.
Around that time, Moviefone was rebranded as AOL Movies, over the cries of many people in the product strategy team. Some may also remember a precursor to TMZ, which was AOL Celebrity. Alternative brands were denied for AOL Television, Research & Learn, AOL Local and others . Non-AOL brads were reserved for franchises, like TV’s Top5 or Sessions.
With the recent shifts in personnel, such as Bill Wilson’s ascent to EVP over all programming, AOL is finally making the smart decisions. Apparently, the shift is away from corporate ego, and towards smart business reality.
Now that they have the traffic, they need to complete Platform-A, so they can effectively monetize their great products.
Great to see AOL is putting up the good fight. Given the pounding they take regularly it is actually nice to see they are enjoying some substantial growth. Although the portal is a copy of Yahoo, I prefer their Finance, News and Moviefone sites.
AOL still have more revenue than Facebook, which will need to place more ads and partnerships to ever make money. Yahoo will benefit from AOL’s strategy. Yahoo 360 for example was a terrible name, maybe something with a little bit more buzz and individual identity - no one joins a site because of corporate allegiance, they want the cool, fresh new underdog that they can claim ownership in. Maybe something like yahoo daily or yahoo 247 to encourage people to visit daily instead of creating a profile and then forgetting about it. Its all about creating unique, fresh user engagement that gets people excited to visit a site.
Frank — you are correct, I am not an avid commenter on TC but I am a fan of AOL Finance. If that makes me an AOL shill in your view, I am ok with that. I gather from your remarks you either disagree with me or you have not taken the time to check out what the site has done, particularly in the stock quotes area. I also saw apple promoting aol’s iphone app this week on the apple web site. Not sure if you took the time to check that our either - but I think it is very strong. If that makes me a shill too, I am ok with that.
“EvanT”- You get up a bit later on the weekend, eh? My point was (in #34), that you are ALL THE SAME PERSON!
Just because you chose one persona to come back and refute the idea does nothing for your credibility.
Go read another set of comments and you will understand why you stick out like a sore thumb.
It isn’t about being a shill, or being ok with being a shill. It is that you took the time to comment under 8 different names.
Thanks for promoting a healthy life style. I think it is so important. Keep up the informative articles. Adrian