Category Archives: AOL

New York Times: All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate

Posted on by
Reply
Bill Keller: "'Aggregation' can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model. "

Editor & Publisher: More Readers Skimming Google Headlines Than Going Directly to Newspaper Web Sites?

Posted on by
Reply
"The 'News Users 2009' study conducted by Outsell Research affiliate analyst Ken Doctor found that 19% of people accessed Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News for news in 2009, up from 10% in 2006. For newspapers, 19% of those polled went there first, a drop from 23% in 2006. ... Fully 44% of those polled said they scan headlines on Google 'without accessing the newspaper sites,' the report said."

bit.ly blog: Announcing bit.ly Pro

Posted on by
Reply
"The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites. ... Users and publishers benefit from the additional transparency that this private-label service provides. When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. "

BuzzMachine: Content farms v. curating farmers

Posted on by
Reply
Jeff Jarvis: "I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month—one billion—as Google News. Human power rises again. That’s what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because 'it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.'"

FT: AOL sets sights on content-led domination

Posted on by
Reply
"AOL will on Friday unveil the early stages of a plan to become the internet’s largest provider of original content within two years. ... Combined, traffic to AOL-owned MediaGlow, which houses all its content sites, rose 5 per cent in June from a year ago to 75.4m, according to comScore, and 22 of its sites ranked in the top five in their categories."

Advertising Age: AOL Cracks Web Publishing — Sans Time Warner

Posted on by
1
"The model goes something like this: Find a vertical with an audience attractive to advertisers, brand it (Daily Finance, Asylum, Lemondrop, Politics Daily), hire five to seven people to run it and plug in AOL's traffic fire hose. Repeat. They're the antithesis of the kind of quality standards Time Inc. and Condé Nast tout, relying largely on aggregation, blogging and traffic-goosing tricks such as provocative slide shows. But unlike the print publications trying to port their cost structure to the web, these publications can be cash-positive from the start."