What a difference a year makes.
One year ago, we relaunched AOL.com with the goal of being America's most intuitive, influential, and inspiring start page. Just a year ago, we had no HuffPost, a little bit of video, and Patch was still emerging.
We set out to do four things – put video front and center, better showcase our content, create new opportunities for our partners, and streamline access to AOL Search, Mail, and Local. The great news - the results have been significant year over year growth across the board with metrics like engagement and traffic.
Some highlights of where we are and where we are going:
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Video– Working with AOL Studios, we launched several new series like You've Got (110MM+ views and counting*) and HuffPost Celebrity, and we now do approximately 64.6M video views a month on AOL.com [September 2011 comScore Video Metrix]. We expect that to grow as we expand the AOL Video experience in the coming months.
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Content – Content referrals have exploded as we added AOL article pages to expand the experience and re-imagined the center column to be tighter and punchier. We now feature night and weekend stories to give AOL.com a distinctive overnight flavor. We have significantly upgraded the editorial vision and we now program the site 24 hours a day.
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Advertising– We view advertising in same light as content – meaning it should be engaging, useful, held to high standards and beautifully displayed. It used to be we sold one banner per day. But the market and consumers demanded more creativity and more impactful advertising. We answered by adding several new products like the Partner DL, the Mantle, the Custom Video Module and the industry's most dynamic rich media executions, Project Devil.
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Services– Working closely with the search team and through constant testing, we saw huge growth in search. Local referrals also doubled. We're now working to improve our content syndication to AOL Mail. We also are building new tabs on AOL.com to better surface AOL's growing portfolio of Local and Social tools.
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Cause–Our number one core value is "We are in the business of helping people. Period."
To that end we view the AOL homepage as an incredible platform to help people improve their lives while shining a spotlight on non-profits doing amazing work. We've taken our responsibility as America's startpage seriously and served 12 billion pro-bono impressions on behalf of 250 non-profits and 35 Top 100 advertisers through the power of the Daily Impact Unit*. We also aggressively built marketing and programming efforts around important causes like helping Americans get jobs and supporting our troops and veterans.
Last November's relaunch was really just the first step in a constant evolution of the page. The biggest advantage we have is the web's best audience – affluent, influential, brand conscious, trendy individuals who want an easy, fun, and trustworthy internet experience.
We're getting smarter about how to reach and grow our audience in 2012. Great Audience + Great Content and Services + Great Ad Formats = the Best Page.
To those of you who visit aol.com every day –thank you. And for those who don't... set aol.com...
*Internal Data
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