As AOL and Yahoo struggle to keep pace with display ad gains from Google, Facebook and Amazon, the portals have placed much of their hopes on lucrative brand campaign-friendly homepage ads. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter has been charting the progress of the portals’ homepage ad quality and quantity, and it looks like Q4 was a […]
AOL has been promising a bigger effort on the programmatic side of the business all year and the company is ending 2012 with an acquisition that’s intended to both reflect and build on that focus. The company being acquired is Buysight, a retargeting and retail lead gen specialist. The four-year-old company will be folded into […]
AOL’s display performance is in comeback mode, but growth is lopsided. The company’s Q3 earnings presented a clear demonstration of the strength of third party network, which includes the flagship ad unit Advertising.com, as revenues jumped 18 percent over the same period in 2011. At the same time, revenue from AOL’s owned & operated sites […]
Last month’s ad spending tally from the Interactive Advertising Bureau was another “record-breaker,” as marketers lavished $17 billion on web ads between January and the end of June 2012. Display revenues in the first half totaled almost $5.6 billion, up 4 percent from $5.3 billion in the first half of 2011. So everything should be […]
While AOL’s Q3 growth was surely a welcome sign to patient investors, the fact that it has continued to come from its third party network and search ad deal with Google could be a long term problem. During a call with analysts, CEO Tim Armstrong acknowledged several times that the “traditional” display model of ad […]
AOL opened up its presence for this year’s Advertising Week by giving its “premium, brand-focused” Project Devil ads something of an upgrade. Although not greeted with the same kind of anticipation that is associated with the latest iPhone version, Project Devil is as crucial to AOL’s revenue generation as the smartphone is to Apple’s. For […]
In Q2, as it has for the past year, AOL’s third party network revenue rose by double digits, while U.S. display dollars remained flat. Read the earnings release. During the earnings call with investors, who once again saw their low expectations exceeded by AOL’s performance, CEO Tim Armstrong batted back questions about the advertising challenge […]
Despite AOL’s efforts to build up its owned & operated sites, including the Huffington Post Media Group its local content offering Patch, the portal’s real growth has always come from its Advertising.com ad network. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise when AOL announced a few executive shifts that are designed to highlight the […]
AOL’s slight stumble on display ad sales in Q1 was due to “distractions” the company experienced in Q4, as the company continued to refine its content strategy and place the Huffington Post brand on top of its content offerings and the company continued to refine its content and sales strategies. CEO Tim Armstrong told AdExchanger following […]
The buildup around the online advertising “NewFront” presentations this week from Microsoft, Yahoo, Digitas and others are meant to appear similar to the annual TV upfront extravaganzas, AOL appeared to take the notion as seriously as possible. At a rented studio on Manhattan’s west side, the company unveiled a presentation that makes AOL’s content offerings […]
