AOL's Secret Love(.com)


AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com – it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.

The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.

The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement.

Right now AOL isn’t saying much about Love.com, other than they plan to roll it out officially sometime later this year, and that the goal is “to create sites with content on any topic that people love.” Love.com is described on the MediaGlow site as “The Love.com Network covers all the topics you love, all under one big roof, with hundreds of thousands of topic blogs to suit fans of all things.” Eventually, we hear, users will be able to create a customizable home page which brings in content from specific topics they want to track.

Love.com originally launched in 2003 as a personals site. it was later changed to simply redirect to Match.com, which has a long term partnership with AOL.

More on AOL employee Frank Gruber’s blog.