ComScore Reports Increase In Traffic To AOL Websites
The Wall Street Journal (4/25, Steel, B1, 2.06M) reports, “A yearlong effort by AOL to transform its content Web sites into crowd-pleasers is beginning to pay off.” The Journal continues, “Traffic to the sites — including AOL Money & Finance, entertainment, and the male-oriented Asylum — grew 15% to 56.5 million unique U.S. visitors in the first quarter from a year ago, according to comScore Media Metrix. Measured by traffic, some of the sites even top the charts for their categories.” AOL “still hasn’t translated the surge in visits into higher ad revenue. But the news is positive for the Time Warner Inc. unit, which has struggled with another initiative — building AOL into a major digital ad-sales firm.” The content push “is part of AOL’s bid to reinvent itself as an ad-supported Web company following its August 2006 decision to make its Internet-access service free. Visits to AOL’s Web sites slowed as a side-effect of that decision. … To draw visitors back, AOL redesigned sites in the news, sports and health categories. It also created a half-dozen new sites that don’t use the AOL name, such as a technology-focused site called Switched, a hip-hop site called BlackVoices, and a Web trend tracker called Urlesque.com, as well as Asylum. Dropping its name was an acknowledgement that the brand wasn’t hip enough for the consumers AOL was trying to attract.” AOL “also adopted some common tricks of the trade, such as making its sites appear higher in search-engine results.”
Time Warner To Announce Quarterly Results On Wednesday. MarketWatch (4/24, Wilkerson) reported, “Analysts will be anticipating higher profits at several large media conglomerates such as Time Warner Inc., Comcast Corp. and Viacom Inc. next week, but will also be on the lookout for signs that a shaky U.S. economy is having an adverse effect on spending by advertisers and consumers.” Time Warner announces its quarterly results Wednesday morning, and analysts see the company “earning 23 cents a share on revenue of $11.4 billion. In the year-earlier quarter, excluding discontinued operations and special items – including the effect of accounting changes — the company would have earned 22 cents a share on sales of $11.2 billion.” Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes “will surely have to field questions about speculation that AOL could hook up with Yahoo. … As usual, analysts will be monitoring advertising growth at AOL, which has been declining for several quarters.” Time Warner “has pointed out that AOL has discontinued several ‘nonprofitable’ sponsorships, and that ad demand is shifting to third-party networks.”
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