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AOL’s Platform-A enters strategic partnership with FreeCreditReport.com

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AOL’s Platform-A has entered into a multi-faceted strategic relationship with FreeCreditReport.com, the provider for online consumer credit reports, scores and monitoring.

The partnership will fully leverage Platform-A’s diverse slate of advertising solutions, including deep customized content integration within AOL’s properties and a variety of broad-based campaigns across Platform-A’s networks, ensuring the ability to harness the full power of digital media advertising.

Originally posted on February 2, 2009 @ 11:54 am

AOL launches new version of its web mail

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AOL’s Products and Technologies Group launched an enhanced version of AOL Web Mail that offers users one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and a variety of third-party sites and destinations directly from the AOL Web Mail page.

Over the past year, AOL has added more than 30 new features and a variety of new functionality to Web Mail in an effort to make it more open to third-party content and to offer more monetization opportunities to advertisers. The new version is being released globally, making it available in more than 38 countries and locales around the world.

Key features of AOL’s new Web Mail product include:

Access to Third-Party E-mail Accounts: The third-party mail plug-ins allow users to preview Yahoo! Mail and Gmail within the AOL Web Mail experience, as well as take advantage of one-click access to Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.

Faster performance: Using updated technologies, AOL has increased the speed and performance of its Web Mail experience, and enhanced the user interface to make it more intuitive.

Themed Skins: More than 45 new “skins” or themes let users personalize their page, and offer advertisers the ability to work with AOL to create themes that will appeal to key audiences.

Plug-in Gallery: Users can customize their Web Mail page by choosing from a variety of new plug-ins offering one-click access to favorite sites, content, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. The Gallery also offers access to all of the AOL gadgets currently stored in the myAOL Gallery. In addition, AOL is inviting third-party developers to create new gadgets for Web Mail via http://dev.aol.com.

AOL Sync: Users can make real-time updates to AOL Calendar and Address Book from their desktop or a variety of wireless devices, including the Blackberry and iPhone. In addition, users around the globe can enjoy a completely mobile AOL Mail experience from virtually any device.

The launch marks the first release from the AOL Product and Technologies Group, created as one of the final steps in AOL’s transformation to an advertising-supported business.

Originally posted on January 22, 2009 @ 12:02 pm

AOL expands its publishing unit with MediaGlow; Now a fully ad-supported business

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mediaglow6-1.epsAOL announced today a series of significant developments that will dramatically expand, reposition and monetize its digital publishing business in 2009. Anchoring today’s announcement is the creation of a new AOL business unit, MediaGlow, which will centralize AOL’s entire publishing efforts, with the goal of greatly expanding the unit’s global reach in the coming year.

This move also completes AOL’s transformation to an advertising supported business. MediaGlow and its publishing assets will now join Platform-A and People Networks as the third core business for AOL.

In conjunction with today’s announcement, AOL announced two important publishing developments:

• MediaGlow will continue its aggressive momentum in the development of the new AOL.com, and its vertical Web sites focused on passion points, with the goal of creating over 30 editorially curated sites in 2009. In addition to newly curated sites, MediaGlow will also maximize the technology of acquired companies Relegence and Sphere and begin an unprecedented effort to build thousands of medium and long-tail focused automated sites in 2009 and 2010, which will efficiently continue AOL’s growth position in publishing.

* MediaGlow will add to its infrastructure two state-of-the-art studios, located in AOL Headquarters in New York City and its offices in Los Angeles. MediaGlow Studios will provide new video production capabilities from hi-def video to complete editing and encoding. The studios will also be used to shoot original video productions that will now be distributed globally.

Originally posted on January 12, 2009 @ 12:24 pm

It’s now 22 months of consecutive growth for AOL

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AOL websites continued to see strong growth in November, extending year-over-year growth in unique visitors to 22 consecutive months, according to the November 2008 comScore Media Metrix report.

Unique visitors to AOL’s programming content sites grew 3% year-over-year to 54 million in November. In addition, page views climbed 66% year-over-year to 3.8 billion and engagement (total minutes) grew 33% year-over-year in November, showing AOL consumers are actively engaging with the sites. Advertising revenues on AOL’s programming sites have had double-digit growth year-over-year in Q3 2008.

In addition, the recently completely redesigned AOL.com, which opened the site to third-party content, e-mail, social networks and more, grew 14% in page views, 13% in unique visitors and 29% in total minutes, year-over-year.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 10:57 am

AOL launches gaming resource for parents

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AOL announced the launch of PlaySavvy.com, a site that targets parents of children ages 5-17 and helps them decipher the world of games, both PC and console. PlaySavvy also helps parents stay aware of their kids’ entertainment choices including assisting them in making informed decisions about buying games for their children.

The PlaySavvy.com launch is a continuation of AOL’s overall programming goal to offer consumers interactive and engaging experiences with relevant sites that target people’s passion points. This year, AOL launched several targeted sites including ParentDish.com, Lemondrop.com, WalletPop.com, and Holidash.com.

“Playing video games is one of the top pastimes for children these days, almost more than watching TV. We created AOL PlaySavvy to help parents navigate through all the gaming information out there in order to decide what’s appropriate for their children,” said Libe Goad, Editor-in-Chief, AOL PlaySavvy. “In addition, PlaySavvy provides advertisers the opportunity to reach this targeted user base by creating appealing campaigns around the content.”

Originally posted on December 1, 2008 @ 1:56 pm