If they’re evenly spaced, a launch will occur every 15 or so days. If they’re not, well, there’s no telling. But regardless of the specifics, Bill Wilson, AOL’s executive vice president of programming, has promised that his company will launch 12 new sites in the next six months.
Bill Wilson – VP Of AOL Programming
According to Wilson, “We want to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can.” No elaboration about the types of consumers or the content of the sites followed.
To some people, Wilson’s words might sound like little more than a promise of additional spaghetti; AOL’s been seen as flailing as the portal business dries up. And, given the whole lack-of-specifics thing, we can’t really reject that interpretation.
AOL’s not in as bad a shape as pessimists might imagine, however; numbers suggest that traffic to its niche sites grew quite a bit in January. Also, after we published an article on that period, a senior communications manager contacted us with decent-looking data from the previous four months.
Meh. Anyway, Gillian Wee first reported Wilson’s 12-in-six-months quote, and she also pointed out, “New York-based Time Warner’s 24 percent drop last year made it the 10th-worst performer in the Standard & Poor’s 100 Index.” AOL no doubt wants to reverse this trend.
