AOL Horror Show
Long time readers of this blog will know that I had been down on AOL because I thought that the ending of the Univeristy of Phoenix deal ($215m last year) would be a huge hit for ad.com and that’s why AOL’s ad revenue would be hurt. That wasn’t the case.
Ad.com continued its meteoric rise: Third-party Network revenue rose 25% to $188m. Now to be fair, Ad.com itself was flat and the rise was attributable to the grab bag of ad-networks the company acquired last year but flat is a great result nonetheless when this big loss was factored in.
So what went wrong? Primarily display advertising on AOL’s owned and operated sites fell 18% from $232m to $191m.
John Martin Jr said this on the call:
“based on our internal estimates, we think total page views were 6% higher than last year’s first quarter”
Firstly, you think?!
Secondly, from that we can deduce that AOL’s eCPM on its display properties plummeted 23% year over year. Even in the face of page views transitioning to more vertically focused properties (vertical page views were up 22% year over year).
This is quite simply incredulous. No wonder they are trying to offload this thing to Yahoo (or Microsoft if Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo ultimately fails).
