Dissecting AOL’s Business Plan, ‘The AOL Way’
By Anna Johnson on February 16th, 2011If you’re in the business of affiliate marketing or making money from advertising – as many Internet marketers are – you’ll want to take a look at the ‘AOL Way’. The AOL Way reveals AOL’s plans for its content publishing business, and was recently leaked to the Business Insider.
Indeed, thanks to the Business Insider, you can review the entire 58 slide presentation, ‘The AOL Way Content, Product, Media Engineering, and Revenue Management‘ at your leisure.
There’s so much gold in this document that we’ll be dissecting the AOL Way and discussing the key take-outs for Internet marketers in a series of upcoming articles in the Kikabink News Internet marketing blog.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the AOL Way is necessarily a blueprint for Internet marketing success.
The jury is well and truly out on AOL. A few weeks ago, the company reported a net loss of $782.5 million for 2010, a big come-down from its $248.8 million profit in 2009.
According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL was in ‘turnaround’ mode during 2010. It was a year in which AOL stood on its own, after parent company Time Warner spun the company off in December 2009. And it was a year of sell-offs (e.g. Bebo), acquisitions (e.g. TechCrunch) and repositioning, as AOL began remaking itself as a content publisher that makes money from advertising sales, rather than an Internet service provider that makes money from dialup Internet subscriptions.
Yet, AOL’s fourth quarter results indicate the company may have a way to go before achieving its turnaround. Even as the company moves towards being a content publisher, its Q4 ad revenues were down 29 percent compared with those in Q4 2009.
The AOL Way, it seems, is AOL’s manifesto for turning itself around. Whether or not it does the job – or whether AOL does the job – remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, the AOL Way reveals a range of objectives, methodologies and metrics that Internet marketers will find interesting and instructive. So be sure to read Kikabink News’ upcoming articles on the AOL Way, as we study the plan and extract those points likely to help us build, grow or turn around our own Internet businesses.
