AOL Strong Growth off Niche Redesign and Rebranding
AOL has done an exceptional job positioning themselves in most major vertical markets, but more than just their presence AOL has completely dominated most of these spaces. Black voices is no exception, the industry leader in the Black Community News, AOL is starting to see the benefit from the success of BV and other niche focused websites. AOL property’s have hit an all time high in high in unique visitors and traffic in March, the company says. Page views to AOL’s network of sites are up 35% over the last year and unique visitors up 11% to 56 million (AOL as a whole draws 209 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore). AOL attributes its recent success to its year long rebranding and redesign efforts, noting that every key vertical site has been redesigned. (Check out our coverage of the Black Voices Redesign).
AOL has also focused on rebranding many of their niche sites by allowing them to drop the AOL brand altogether. This gives the sites the ability to establish themselves as separate entities allowing them to build upon their own brand success while potentially mitigating the damage if the parent brand takes a hit (and vise versa). This seem to be an overall trend with the promotion of most corporate own websites (See the Washington Post’s launch of TheRoot.com or IAC’s Launch of Rushmore Drive ).
