AOL is reportedly buying back a 5% stake owned by Google, and it has a new CEO in Tim Armstrong, formerly of Google. A spinoff from Time Warner is also anticipated. These ingredients may make for a bright future for the company. What does this mean for AOL and Google’s relationship?
“It remains to be seen whether Google’s repurchasing of its AOL stake also means it will discontinue partnering with AOL to deliver its search advertising,” says John Letzing at MarketWatch. “According to a deal secured at the time of its investment, Google has been applying its expertise to serving up AOL’s search advertising and splitting the resulting revenue.”
Nielsen has AOL listed as the number 4 parent company/division, and the number 5 web brand in the US.
In January, AOL launched its MediaGlow business unit consisting of a slew of sites. Many of these and other AOL sites are ranked among the top five in their respective categories in terms of unique visitors according to comScore. Just this week, they launched a new “old-school” political site.
Still AOL’s ad revenue fell 17% in the first quarter according to MarketWatch, despite indications of strong performance of AOL homepage ads.
Also launched this week was Socialthing, a new platform that connects social networks with other sites. This allows for easy syndication of content through networks like AOL’s own Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. This could be a popular service in the realm of social media.
But what about search?
“AOL has made moves which show that the company is getting very serious about search, and may one day step out of the shadow it has cast upon itself as being a “Google regurgitator,” Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal said earlier this month. It is being run by a former Google executive keep in mind.
“Furthermore, AOL controls some rather interesting search technology, ranging from semantic search to multimedia search,” adds Baker. He mentions social video network Truveo, Relegence, Yedda Semantic Search, and Quigo.
One more piece of interesting info that Baker points out is that AOL’s search share grew more than Microsoft or Yahoo’s after last year according to Nielsen Online stats. The point is, AOL’s as much of the conversation as either of those two. And it may be independent soon.
