RSSAOL, if you can believe it, breaks traffic records
By Angela Gunn | Published November 13, 2008, 3:48 PM
The service formerly known as America Online is, to be blunt about it, more popular than you are. Yes, this is still 2008.
AOL may have driven off some very loyal users with the announcement last month that it was ditching its Journals and Hometown properties, but blog-style sites are still clearly working for the service. Its "programming sites" are breaking their own traffic records, and the company overall reports its 21st quarter of year-over-year growth in unique visitors.
Even the most rabid AOL-bashers may be contributing to the tallies, since a number of the service's most successful properties don't really scream little-yellow-running-guy. Among the sites you may have forgotten AOL owns: Gizmo mecca Engadget, gossip purveyor TMZ, and Quantum of Solace locator Moviefone.
Some of those sites are, in fact, leading their niches according to the most recent comScore Media Metrix traffic reports. AOL's number-ones for October, and the audiences they target, were Asylum (men), BlackVoices (African Americans), MapQuest (the directionally challenged), StyleList (the sartorially challenged), AOL Music, and AOL Television.
Overall, AOL's repudiation of its ancient walled-garden strategy seems to be working out. Design changes allowing direct links to non-AOL content, especially social-networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the AOL-owned Bebo), have broken down some inside-vs.-outside thinking; and the ability to access one's Yahoo mailbox from inside AOL Mail has garnered favorable comment, though doing nothing to quell the rumors that AOL and Yahoo are getting more-than-friendly at the corporate level.
In related news, AOL Webmail had 3.5 billion page views last month, a record for the service. The record-breaking unique-visitors number for the programming sites was 54.3 million, a 7% year-over-year increase, and the company also says that total minutes spent on AOL.com reached an all-time high in October, though no final number was revealed.
Brilliantly written!
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|TMZ.....
LOL!
Perhaps the only thing that actually rivals the actions of the head up their posterior entitled Bozos to which they imagine themselves superior...
LOL!
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|There is a *big* difference between traffic and making money. Although AOL is able to generate significant traffic, it can't make a really good use of it as profits have been the in the lowest numbers.
As an example, Google generates a lot of traffic, but it also makes money on all ad clicks. AOL, in contrast, generates traffic but with ridiculous flash ads doesn't make a significant profit on it. There is a reason TimeWarner want to sell AOL to others.
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|Worthless are those that actually read sites like TMZ. What a waste--bad journalism and stories on the gutter celebrities mostly.
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|While they are, as a company, awful; I can't help but want them to still be around so at least we all have something to moan about together.
That, and they haven't completely killed Winamp.
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|And see, Paul S., I'd say they killed Winamp with the release of Version 3 :-) . I actually still run little old 2.85 on one machine here; just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's not sufficient for certain purposes.
(There's an article I'd love to do one of these days: Eight [or whatever number] epic-fail upgrades. You've got your Winamp 3, you've got your WordPerfect 5.2, you've got your Windows Me [go ahead, make your own Vista joke here, I'll wait]... hmm.)
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|I agree, 3 was junk.
They made plenty of mistakes with it with 3, which carried over to the very early versions of 5. Soon they realised that people wanted the old functionality back (and a lite build to boot).
I'm as happy with it now as I was with 2, but there was a time where I didn't upgrade for a couple of years.
I still run the classic skin even now.
*Edit* Add Nero 7+ to that list, and probably Ad-Aware 2007+
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|Norton Ghost post-2003. /sadface
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|Ooh, forgot all about poor Norton Ghost. Ad-Aware, meanwhile.... let's just say I blocked that memory with extreme prejudice. Sheesh.
And then there's Firefox for the PC -- the 2.0 version was just horrendous in testing. One of the most obnoxious pieces of software ever in that respect. Yet later versions, especially with proper application of plug-ins? All better. Go know...
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|Running version 2.78 here. I refuse to upgrade any higher due to AOl's ownership of it. 2.78 works great.
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