AOL Plans A Dozen New Websites Within Next Six Months
By David Kaplan - Mon 03 Mar 2008 08:40 AM PST
With portals attracting less traffic and ad money these days, AOL (NYSE: TWX) hopes to build up its numbers in those respective areas by forming a dozen new websites within the next six months, Bloomberg reports. As Avenue A/Razorfish found in its recent Digital Outlook, ad spending on the major web portals fell to 19 percent last year from 24 percent in 2006, while search share rose to 31 percent from 28 percent and vertical sites grew to 39 percent from 37 percent.
Although AOL’s been getting most of its attention from shifting from an ISP to an ad network, the Time Warner unit did introduce about 30 new sites last year, with a heavy concentration on lifestyle (Asylum, for example) music (Spinner) and sports (Fanhouse). AOL is otherwise mum on what sort of categories it plans to focus on for this year, though Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of programming, did tell Bloomberg that he expects that by the end of this year, AOL will have exceeded the amount of sites it created in 2007.
Posted in: Advertising, Companies, Time Warner, AOL
