WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler
AOL CONUNDRUM
Saul Hansell has an article in The New York Times today about the apparent move by AOL to beef up and "push" aol.com as a portal play.
Obviously AOL has big traffic, but they have missed out on some of the search ad dollar boom by being mostly a "closed" or subscription site. By making aol.com a more interesting destination, the Time Warner folks hope to become a significant "free" portal player.
AOL will continue to work its basic subscription property which has some 26 million subscribers (but this number has been in decline). A combination of the subscription area and the portal area could be a winning parlay. Presumably aol.com would not have to get huge traffic in order for it to be modestly successful. But what if aol.com is very successful --- will such success induce an even greater number of of the paid part of AOL to leave for aol.com?
Another thought: Time Warner should consider buying AskJeeves and or looksmart. The traffic and services that both offer might be a good way to be "player" in the free portal space quickly.
Alan, How do we get your colleague Michael Gartenberg to turn the comments on his blog as well? I realize that this is totally off topic and the completely wrong place to ask this but somehow it seems appropriate to comment in a comment asking for comments. There is really no way to communicate with Michael. He is articulate and his writing is very insightful but the conversation is pretty one sided. Recently Steve Rubel praised you for turning your comments on. I agree with Steve that this was a fine thing for you to do. I'd love to see others at Jupiter Media follow your lead and do the same.
Oh and not to stay totally off topic, AOL has no chance at becoming a serious portal play at this point. The opportunity point for that passed a long long time ago. It's way too late for AOL to innovate. The best they can hope for now is to milk those remaining subscribers for as long as they can and resign themselves to losing subscribers each and every year but maintaining a base nonetheless. Kind of like Blockbuster.
Much like Pepsi and Coke AOL breaks into a few different competing sub-brands and literally competes against itself on various sub-levels. The Internal crowd stresses this community by breaking down into a more local culture in cities, states, etc. and the external Web-crowd who pays to access the internal network of people. The ‘AOL Insider’ crowd should be treated like investors, or partners, more than subscribers and can access bulletin boards, classifieds, etc. at no cost, while the external crowd pays to access the internals. One offsets the other through time.