AOL Traffic Numbers Grow. Uh Oh, Traditional Media
April 25th, 2008 | by Brad King |If traditional media outlets don’t find a way to move from a product to a service model (with apologies to Jim Griffin, since I’m stealing his line about the music industry and co-opting it for media), modern media companies are going to wipe them across the floor.
That’s my contention anyway.
We’re going to see Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL start to figure out how to both generate content, create news and better serve the online audience.
Does that mean traditional media will fade away? Yes and no. There will be fewer traditional outlets. I’m actually waiting for the first out-and-out purchase of a news organization by a modern media company.
But these traditional companies won’t ever disappear. Still, there should be some concern that even AOL has figured out how to grow its traffic.
A couple interesting aspects of this story:
- AOL has largely abandoned its brand as it tries to build content-specific sites aimed at large populations;
- The company focused on redesigns (although I have no idea if that meant functionality over form, which is how it should be);
- and the company showed a willingness to reconsider how it approaches each site, regardless of past experience.
To draw visitors back, AOL redesigned sites in the news, sports and health categories. It also created a half-dozen new sites that don’t use the AOL name, such as a technology-focused site called Switched, a hip-hop site called BlackVoices, and a Web trend tracker called Urlesque.com, as well as Asylum. Dropping its name was an acknowledgement that the brand wasn’t hip enough for the consumers AOL was trying to attract.
A bit deeper into the story, the Journal discusses the threats to AOL’s targeted sites — and none of them are traditional media companies, in terms of who the challenger is.
