Time Warner reported its third quarter results today and revealed that the AOL business isn’t doing too well but not as bad as some had expected (though it’s bound to get worse this quarter).
Total revenues for Time Warner remained flat compared to the same period in 2007 at $11.7 billion with earnings of 30 cents a share, while revenues for the AOL segment decreased 17% ($207 million) to $1 billion. Ad spending is hurting (6% decrease, or $33 million, to $507 million), and a even bigger problem are the declining revenues from subscription services (26% decrease, or $165 million, to $470 million).
From the official statement:
Driving the decrease in Advertising revenues were declines in display advertising on AOL Network sites and sales of advertising on third-party Internet sites, offset partially by an increase in paid-search advertising.
AOL claims it averaged 110 million monthly domestic unique visitors and 54 billion domestic page views, citing comScore’s Media Metrix, which translates into 165 average monthly domestic page views per unique visitor.
AOL recently overhauled its homepage and decided to shutter a number of services, like AOL Pictures, BlueString and XDrive earlier this year.
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After the election, ad spending on political ads could drop even more. We’ll see soon how much of an impact it had on display advertising.
Maybe Yahoo will buy AOL now!
Be interesting if Yahoo bought AOL. No one ca ever compete with the almight Google and their world domination
Doesn’t surprise me. I haven’t seen an AOL advertisement in what seems like forever. Other than being associated with Time-Warner I thought they fell off the earth.
Whatever AOL is down on, Google already has the UP on!
Maybe their behavioral advertising model isn’t working. How many AOL computers do you think are shared?