comscore posts

We're thrilled to share with you the news that The Huffington Post has just become Canada's largest national news site, with a record 3.9 million monthly unique visitors in Canada, compared to key national news competitors, including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and National Post*.

In reference to the recent release of the September data from comScore Inc. we could not be more excited with the great news!

Since the site launched in May 2011, Canadian unique visitors to The Huffington Post have grown by 150% and the average visitor spends more than 17 minutes on our sites**.

In Canada, there are 3 regional editions of The Huffington Post, including Le Huffington Post Québec, The Huffington Post Alberta and The Huffington Post British Columbia. We have launched 12 Canadian specific sections, including HuffPost Canada Style, Living, Music, Impact, Art de Vivre, Travel and more! In addition to our traffic growth, we have seen our social community flourish with over 1,400 bloggers, in excess of 2 million social actions per month, over 20,000 weekly comments and have a social following of more than 65,000 fans on Facebook and more than 46,000 Twitter followers – now that is breaking news!

Our blend of unique Canadian programming, original reporting, photo and video galleries on people's favorite topics and stories and our signature mix of blogs and a strong DNA for social news and sharing have quickly propelled us to a leadership position in the Canadian marketplace.

*comScore Inc., Total Canada, Home and Work. Sept 2012. [E] Huffington Post Global compared to [P] The Globe And Mail, [M] Toronto Star, [S] and National Post Sites.
** comScore Inc., Total Canada, Home and Work. June 2011 vs. Sept 2012. [E] Huffington Post Global.

The MapQuest family at AOL just got a little bit bigger. On Wednesday, it was announced that Jennifer Kinney has joined the company as senior technology director, leading all MapQuest browser-based solutions for desktop, tablet and mobile platforms.

Jennifer joins MQ, with a distinguished career in technology and product development. Previously she was senior solutions architect and team lead at international energy firm, Encana Corp, responsible for business solutions architecture and design, as well as technical strategy. Prior to Encana Corp., Kinney led strategy, product development, quality assurance and the deployment of a custom portal for the National Renewable Energy Lab commercialization.

She joins MapQuest at a very exciting time. The brand is in growth mode, currently sitting at the 16^th most popular mobile brand*, as well as being a top 30 website**, and ushering in a new era of inspiring consumers.

To find out more about MapQuest and its products and services, visit its website here.

*comScore MobiLens, August 2012
**comScore Media Metrix, August 2012

Jennifer Kinney joins MapQuest as Senior Technology Director aol.it/TGofBZ

- AOL PR (@AOLPR) October 12, 2012

Today's comScore Media Metrix numbers show our commitment to lifestyle content, and helping people who are looking for real tips and solutions across all areas of the lifestyle space and inspiring their personal style.

The AOL Lifestyle portfolio includes MAKERS, which launched earlier this year, as well as Kitchen Daily, StyleList and Homesessive.

*comScore Media Metrix, September 2012

It's no secret that at AOL, we think video is a hugely important part of today's web experience. In April of this year, I helped to launch AOL's new video arm, The AOL On Network, a major initiative that put our video strategy front and center. The vision behind AOL On is to bring the best of the TV experience – highly curated programming across a variety of channels – to the web. Since then, we've seen incredible traction across the board – with consumers, advertisers, publishers and content producers. Our video library has increased by more than 30% since launch, from 320,000 to 420,000 videos. And through distribution of this content to some of the most popular destinations online, we're now reaching tens of millions of consumers who are hungry for the best of what's on now.

It's for this reason that we're so excited by comScore's Video Metrix Report for August, which tracks the largest video properties on the web. When looking at video streams, we were ranked second only to Google with 725M streams. On average, these viewers spent more than an hour watching our videos. This is a number that we're especially proud of given that the vast majority of our videos are short form. And for the second month in a row, we've also surpassed the 1B marker for total streams of both video ads and content. Lastly, we've been ranked #1 in the Auto, Business, Style, Home, Health, Travel, Technology and Food categories. Our success in this area validates our channel strategy and speaks to the contextual targeting that media buyers in a recent BrightRoll study say is the most valuable form of targeting.

We think this is just the beginning of a very bright future for our video at AOL, and we encourage you to stay tuned for more.

* Source: comScore Media Metrix, August 2012 Content Videos only

The AOL Dulles summer interns and the NextGen business resource group (BRG), an Employee Interest Group established to empower and enrich young professionals at AOL through collaboration, social networking, and professional development, showed off their competitive spirit last Friday by hosting a kickball tournament on our Dulles campus. AOL competed against interns and NextGeners from local companies comScore and Raytheon.

The idea for the event kicked off when Dulles interns and the NextGen BRG thought it would be a great way to have fun getting to know one another. A few brainstorming sessions later, the Intern Social Ambassador Group and myself added a few local companies to the mix. After interest grew, it was decided to make the tournament a charitable event.

With the help of AOLers Blair Cobb and Sara Bennett, the tournament organizers teamed up with the Cause Marketing Team and the AOL Marathon Team to raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House Music Room Project. Funds will be put toward renovating the music room at the Ronald McDonald House in New York City in honor of AOLer Rory Wheeler, who died last July. For every employee who participated in the kickball tournament, the Cause Marketing team donated money to the AOL Marathon Team fundraising page for the Ronald McDonald House. AOL recently donated a media room to the house in October.

The tournament kicked off with food, music, signs, cheering squads and round-robin games among the three teams to see who would take home bragging rights. In the end, the AOL interns' skills and teamwork landed them the most points of all three teams.

Learn more about interning at AOL by visiting our careers page.

Summer Interns Play Kickball for a Cause aol.it/Oar5ZW

- AOL PR (@AOLPR) July 18, 2012