Bill Wilson’s star continues to rise at AOL even as other groups continue to shed products and execs. He moves from EVP Programming to President of the newly formed MediaGlow, which controls all of AOL’s content sites.
AOL’s programming sites (Money & Finance, News, Sports, Health, Food, Music, Games, and Moviefone, among others) have been on a tear for the last year and a half and now attract 70 million monthly visitors, says AOL. Page views have grown 40% year over year.
The NYTimes reports that the group controls 75 sites and will add 30 more this year. Many of these sites, as we’ve previously reported, have little or no AOL branding at all.
Lots of smart work being done here, look how they ramp’d lemondrop from 0 to 1 million UV in 6 months.
Totally making this years sale well worth it.
How much of AOL does Yahoo own?
The sites look almost the same…
Wilson’s progress appears to be related to his relative efficiency to create and monetize web inventory: with eCPMs dropping to insanely low levels, he stood out with some really smart moves.
I wonder if they would have made better returns IF the sites had been branded heavily with the AOL brand? What is their reasoning as many years ago, their sites where AOL’ish to the max color, logo and general brand wise.
Jon
http://2xStocks.com
Doubling my money, one stock at a time!
Bill Wilson’s unprecedented thinking and Strategic moves has made him successful.
Chris Martin
Online Tips for Computer Users & Bloggers
http://www.aboutonlinetips.com
Anyone who has passed through AOL over the years recognizes this as the move we all hoped for….I just wished I had the thick skin to wait it out….very smart move and Wilson is clearly the right choice to lead the new business. He, his team and the results have been showing impressive results for some time now, few have paid any addition (as the NYT piece notes, it has been happening in stealth mode). Exciting to see from the outside
Congratulations Bill. Very well deserved.
Nice move by AOL. I am from the agency side and have been working more with the content sites in the past 6 months then previously….they are hungry and aggressive…which we love from our end. with 30 more sites to come this should be interesting to watch given the success they had in scaling audiences last year. – Karen S.
With AOL moving away from Portals, that only leaves Yahoo now. At least AOL is trying to find a new business model- who goes to Yahoo, AOL or MSN home pages anymore?
Bill seems to be young and smart. If he is that smart, why is he at AOL? Shouldn’t he be out there running a Web 2.0 startup that will really have an effect?
My take- too little too late. If AOL was a small, private company, might work. As a large public company that is still hated by Time, who is is major trouble- there is NO WAY AOL survives as a top web media company.
Like SalesForce and IBM/Oracle. The move to web services has never been driven by an older company in tech. What value is AOL to advertisers if it is a collection of a few minor blogs? Good try for the Long Tail- but too little, too late.
Nice move by AOL. I could want nothing better? It may be…
What the hell is @JillK talking about?
Bill – well deserved. When I was at AOL, I really enjoyed being on your team and given the room to make decisions that impacted the online experience of millions of consumers. Congratulations on MediaGlow. Love the name!
An excellent check by Aol towards yahoo think so…. Congrats Bill
this shit is boring
I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…
Man, I wish they’d ban users such as you. Bloody spammers.