Two years after AOL replaced its subscription service with an ad-based model, the web veteran has redesigned its homepage to incorporate competing services, in a bid to attract lost consumers to its site. The internet portal will now allow integration with third party email features, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, from AOL.com. The change marks a shift in the way AOL wants its users to interact with its homepage, which - according to comScore - currently attracts 105 million worldwide visitors a month. The move also makes AOL the first of the high profile web portals to give its competitors space on its site; Yahoo! and MSN, for instance, are unlikely to spare inches for the likes of Google on their homepages.
The modifications are expected to appear on AOL.com today. According to TechCrunch, more features - including personalised bookmarks, social networking access and an RSS reader - will be added in October. The ability to view social networks is likely to cause a particular stir - not just because third party networks like Facebook and MySpace will be incorporated, but because it will mark AOL's first real integration of Bebo on its homepage, after it acquired the popular site for $850 million in March this year.
The announcement of a new and improved AOL.com comes at a time when the company's future appears to be in doubt. In August, bigmouthmedia reported that the portal could be on the verge of a split from its parent company, Time Warner, who appeared keen to sell the company's advertising and content business for just $10 billion.
The relatively low valuation is of no real surprise to industry commentators. The Wall Street Journal, for example, reports that AOL's ad growth has stalled this year, when compared to the online advertising market as a whole. In the US, online ad growth was marked at 20 per cent in the second quarter; AOL's ad growth in the same quarter, on the other hand, appeared to have stagnated at 1.5 per cent. In addition, the web portal's ad growth was bogged down by a 14 per cent drop in display advertising - graphical ads that remain one of the main features of AOL's homepage.
Earlier this year, AOL received a lot of press coverage when it was speculated that fellow web pioneer Yahoo! was seeking a merger with the company, in a bid to fend off a hostile takeover by software giant Microsoft. Yahoo!'s ad partnership with Google put a stop to that, but AOL is still pushing forward with its plans to expand and enhance its services. But while its closer rivals, like Yahoo! and MSN, simply play catch-up with internet dominatrix Google, AOL's quest is more a matter of survival in an industry that largely regards it as a relic of a bygone digital age.
