Archive for: aol
It seems like the heavy weights of the industry are joining forces to try to gain some advertising marketshare away from Google (im not sure if 3 on 1 is fair). Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft will be offering each other’s premium non-reserved online display inventory to their respective advertising customers. This will all start in 2012 and they say the partnership is non-exclusive so it will mean they will still compete on getting agencies and the bigger contracts.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Microsoft and AOL and bring to market what we believe will be a more efficient, effective and more effortless way to access true premium inventory and formats,” says Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo! EVP of the Americas. “There has a been a significant shift in how inventory is bought and sold, and we’re now 100% focused on controlling our own destiny, working directly with marketers and agencies and driving better returns for our advertising partners.”
via – Yahoo
AOL have been having an identity crisis for quite some time, now it seems that Tim Armstrong (AOL CEO) is trying to amalgamate some of the small sites to create much larger branding within AOL. AOL has just finishing consolidating 53 different content brands into 20 “power brands.”
Within Huffington Post Celebrity you will now find: PopEater articles. AOL News is already consolidated into the Huffington Post and Politics Daily has been rolled into HuffPost Politics. Kitchen Daily will become HuffPost Kitchen, Parent Dish will become HuffPost Parents, AOL Black Voices will become HuffPost Black Voices, and so on. HuffPost Music, HuffPost Small Business, and HuffPost Kids will all be new.
Outside of the Huffington Post, the power brands that will remain are:
AOL.com
Autoblog
Engadget
Joystiq
Mapquest
MMA Fighting
Moviefone
Patch
Stylelist
TechCrunch
TUAW
AOL Autos
AOL Healthy Living
AOL Industry
AOL Money & Finance,
AOL Music
AOL Search
AOL Travel
AOL Video
We first reported about AOL closing down a few of their sites back in January. However, it seems that they are closing a lore more than first expected. AOL is planning on closing over 30 online media brands.
All of this comes after the company acquired the Huffington Post for around $315 million, so now over 900 employees are being laid off.
Many of AOL’s existing sites will be rolled into existing Huffington Post verticals, such as Politics Daily (to be folded into HuffPost Politics), Walletpop (now a part of Daily Finance), Urlesque (folded into HuffPost Comedy), PopEater (folded into HuffPo Entertainment), Luxist (folded into StyleList), ShelterPop (also folded into StyleList) and TV Squad (folded into AOL TV), according to Forbes and All Things D.
Centernetworks has a very interesting article about what AOL gets from the Huffington Post acquisition. Arianna always talks about the quality of the content on the Huffington Post, but is it more of just an SEO play from AOL?
Read the full article here.
Im still in shock that AOL has acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent an internal memo to all AOL employees and here is exactly what it said.
AOLers,
We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet. We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world—The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet.
Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader—one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. Arianna and team have created a brand and a destination that focuses on the consumer experience. By combining The Huffington Post with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video offerings, local expertise and enormous reach, we will create a company that is laser-focused on serving our audiences across every platform imaginable – social, local, video, mobile and tablet.
The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus – 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.
The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content. In addition, Arianna Huffington is a world-renowned expert on women’s topics and issues, and has enabled The Huffington Post to grow rapidly by continually developing new audiences.
In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way.
The Huffington Post will join the family of AOL Brands that are destinations for an influencer audience, brands like TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, and Moviefone. Uniquely, The Huffington Post is the platform for influential people — the people that drive trends, commerce, politics, entertainment, news, and information. Adding this strategic platform to our already strong network of sites, including the AOL homepage, has the potential to make AOL the most influential company in the content space.
Arianna Huffington is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space and someone that is even more successful in building communities and relationships in every corner of the globe. The Huffington Post and Arianna have created a company that has partnered with the most successful and well-known leaders in all aspects of society that touch important topics to give consumers direct access to the most influential decision makers and community leaders.
This acquisition will create a high-quality and diverse digital ecosystem encompassing local, national and international news, politics, entertainment, technology, fashion, sports, health, personal finance, green, lifestyle, the arts and more. This deal will combine the amazing talent at AOL with the innovative and talented staff of The Huffington Post. Here are just a few high-level points around what this deal brings to market:
- Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117MM unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and ~270MM monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).
- The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet. It grew 22% last year – that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18% – and 15x as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).
- Both AOL and The Huffington Post count powerful, affluent users among their top loyal visitors, significantly over-indexing in $100K+ income users.
- AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.
- Between AOL’s innovative Project Devil ad unit, engaging users for 27 seconds longer than traditional display ads, and The Huffington Post’s highly-vocal community, with 4MM+ comments per month, we will marry attention-grabbing content and brand experiences for both advertisers and consumers.
In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a premier global/local syndication network at scale. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely, informative and entertaining way.
To maximize the strategic advantage of this great deal, we will be creating a new group at AOL called The Huffington Post Media Group. Within this group will be AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and our new friends at The Huffington Post. We will continue operating the towns structure, AOL.com and HuffingtonPost.com.
I’m thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will join AOL’s executive team as President and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. We have asked Jon Brod to lead the overall operational integration on the AOL side of the combined entities. Jon will lead the local group integration and work closely with David Eun and the teams in AOL Media. We will work quickly with The Huffington Post to create a combined organizational design to coincide with the deal closing. While we wait for the required regulatory reviews to be completed and the transaction to close before implementing the design, we will move very quickly to plan the details of the integration of the two companies. To this end, we will announce the new organizational structure as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we will continue creating great content and products for our consumers within the town structure and stay laser-focused on the aggressive goals we have set for our winter luge. We are on the right track and will continue our weekly operating cadence and town structure to drive successful results against our company goals.
Here’s a special message for all of you we taped to welcome The Huffington Post and Arianna to our AOL Family:
http://today.office.aol.com/company-news/2011/02/aol-agrees-buy-huffington-post
And of course we wanted to welcome Arianna to our “You’ve Got” video of the day—check her out on AOL.com.
We will be holding a company all hands meeting to address your questions related to today’s exciting news. We will video conference from our New York office on the 6th Floor at 9:30 AM ET and will be joined by Arianna Huffington and key executives from her organization. We will also be holding a call for our west coast offices at 2:00 PM ET and for our Patch offices at 2:45 PM ET. See below for meeting info (conference rooms will be sent out shortly).
AOL is playing to win…and The Huffington Post and AOL will occupy a unique place in the future of the Internet. Let’s go get it done.
–TA
AOL Europe has acquired leading video advertising network GoViral for $96.7 million. Goviral distributes branded video content for mainstream brands, as well as content producers and advertising agencies.
The initial purchase is for $74.1 million and $22.6 million in a two year earn out.
We’re hearing this deal was lead directly by Kate Burns, SVP, AOL Europe. René Rechtman, CEO, goviral secured $8.82 million Series A funding from European VC Kennet Partners in 2009.
In a statement Burns said: “Video is core to AOL’s consumer programming strategy and goviral has created an incredibly compelling platform that delivers highly measureable and cost effective solutions to publishers and advertisers.”
GDS Publishing’s Business Management publication at BusManagement.com produced put together a great infographic called Where Did AOL Go Wrong using stats from Quantcast and information from Wikipedia, NYT, AOL, and CNet.
There is no doubt that the market is becoming overrun with social networks. While there is value in a great number of them, after awhile they all starte to look the same. With only slight variations it makes a person wonder why one would be different from the rest if they are all so similar. That being said, the grand-daddy of the social network medium, MySpace, might be on the endangered species list.
It’s no surprise that during an economic crunch that “re-structuring” is inevitable, but recently we’ve seen a large number of the U.S. staff released from the company, and now the wave appears to be hitting Europe. After reading an article on TechCruch it got me thinking if MySpace is even relevant anymore.
It’s become a marketing ground for new bands, comedians, and other entertainers. The playground to the 15 and below crowd, it fails to reach the depth that other social networks like Facebook have reached in recent years. Much like AOL was a pioneer and has slowly been phased out of importance, is the same happening to the social networking pioneer MySpace?
Do you still use MySpace? If so for what? Do you find it relevant in your life, why or why not? I’d love to gauge the readership of Crenk and find out if MySpace is even a blip on the radar in terms of connecting with people.
- Image by Gnal via Flickr
I worked as a journalist through college, and some after I graduated, and even today I am still producing content for both online and offline projects. As such, nothing infuriates me more then bad journalism, and lack of fact checking. Now before I get blasted, yes I’ve made mistakes, but nothing on the scale of the U.S. economy.
Over the weekend, TechCrunch along with several other media sites, pointed out an incident with The Times reporting a story on Yahoo’s possible bedding of Microsoft with their search technology. For those of us with keen eyes in the industry, the story was missing something, something we just couldn’t put our finger on…perhaps facts. TechCrunch tore the article apart by negating the supposed “facts” of the story and left the article with no leg to stand on. The key to this was that the markets were not open, otherwise a reputable paper printing material like that would have surely made an impact.
Now today, another story comes out announcing another Yahoo buyout story, this time regarding two AOL mavericks, Johnathon Miller and Ross Levinsohn. The article was bogus, the story unconfirmed, later confirmed that while the two were indeed raising money, and while they were having chat with Microsoft and Yahoo, there was no intent to purchase. This time the Wall Street Journal took the brunt of the backlash, and this time people did lose money. Stock for Yahoo jumped 11.7% which resulted in a lot of unhappy people.
This reminds me of a Twitter statement @1938media made regarding those that relied on social media as the “source” for information. “Dopes!” I believe was the word he used. Personally, I don’t know where the story came from, but where was the fact checking? In the rush to be the first to be in-the-know, a lot of people were effected by this financially. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to check facts and sources, and not always rely on the quick and easy. People need to use their own heads and thinks things through, interpret the information and make sound judgement.
You can read the entire TechCrunch article HERE.
When I think of AOL, I think of other similar companies like Microsoft and AT&T. What do they all
have in common? Basically all of them are large companies that think themselves at the top of their game and otherwise frown on smaller more open and approachable initiatives.
For the longest time AOL was an island unto itself. Until just recently AOL users were isolated from other users. The homepage was closed off to competitors, the ISP itself is not open to offering it’s users options, but rather forces them to believe that AOL is all there is.
Interestingly enough, as internet users wise up, and are introduced to various social media networks, connecting over the net with blogs and micro-blogging tools, the internet is a whole new world for users and professionals alike. AOL is finally facing this reality and has added a new feature right off their homepage. They are actually offering users the opportunity to select other email clients as opposed to forcing users to type in the desired destination.
As noted in the photo below you can see how Yahoo, Gmail, have all found a spot right on the AOL homepage (Hotmail access has also been added). This is a welcome addition for AOL users considering the response on the AOL blog post.
What does this mean for AOL? How will this impact their users and will they turn away from AOL Mail? No likely, many of us have multiple accounts for various uses; junkmail, newsletters, subscriptions, purchases, contact with friends and family. AOL is quoted as saying, “We realize that AOL.com is not the only web site that you use and that you may, like many of us, have multiple email accounts with different providers.” So AOL looks to become the official “launchpad” for all their users online experience. This will prevent them from having to type in the address of their preferred email providers and instead provide instant access with a simple click.
AOL confesses that not all of their users will appreciate the change, but for those that don’t, they have made it easy for users to change out the panels in the menu with other popular selections such as Music, Radio, and eBay options to name a few.
With the emergence of a fully customizable homepage, AOL is taking a step in the right direction with their new approach. It is even hinted, according to Techcrunch, that come October AOL could add access to “bookmark[ing], social networks and a RSS reader.” At this rate AOL users will now have a one stop shop for all their online needs, and this is what AOL is banking on.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this new approach by AOL. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been an AOL homepage user, and even longer since I was a subscriber to their ISP, but I find this approach innovative for them, if not a little late. I think this will keep AOL in the game, and I look forward to see what other ideas they plan to roll out.
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