After years of being a for-pay destination with content walled inside a monthly subscription, AOL will offer ad-supported content via its Web site.
Advertising revenues will be the key to the move, according to service provider AOL. That’s why a lot of previously shuttered content will be moving online.
It’s a bold move, as dialup subscribers continue to leave AOL for faster or cheaper Internet connections. Music and video, and a great deal of other content, will be moved to AOL.com. The company plans a formal announcement on June 21.
Instead of competing with the EarthLinks of the world, AOL will compete with the Yahoo!s and MSNs. The potential for lucrative advertising revenue has become so great, the company feels it can make up for subscriber losses. And nearly as many people visit AOL and its affiliates as they do Yahoo sites.
Certain features will remain dedicated to subscribers. AOL.com e-mail addresses, technical support, and parental controls won’t be part of the new portal. For e-mail, AOL recently launch AIM Mail for the 22 million users of its instant messaging client; the service offers 2GB of free e-mail storage.
AOL has noted the trend toward broadband usage in households, and positioned its content to that. Users will be able to make their AOL home page a “Video Hub” featuring video links from Time Warner and its associated companies.
Video searching will be enables through AOL’s own Singingfish multimedia search engine.
And for music fans, AOL plans to conduct a Web-based contest similar to American Idol, with a recording contract as the prize. Also, XM Satellite will provide 20 of its channels through the AOL portal for free.
But as the company moves out of its walled garden and onto the broader Internet, it has to consider something it never worried about before: search engine results. With the existing AOL service, none of its pages could be indexed by the likes of Google.
The portal transition meant recoding its content from the proprietary in-house Rainman language to HTML. Also, AOL’s coders have been adding meta content so search engines can better index the pages.
It’s a long way from 2400 baud modems and a minimal number of hours per month to use the AOL service of a decade ago.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
