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Posts Tagged ‘million-uniques’

Interesting off hand comment by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong at the Fortune event this morning. Bebo, the social network AOL paid $850 million for in 2008, wasn’t mentioned on the list of AOL’s core product goals going forward. Late in the interview, though, Armstrong was asked where Bebo fits into that strategy. His answer, roughly quoted “Bebo may be better off under AOL Ventures, with it’s own P&L.”

Translation - AOL is looking to spin Bebo off into an independent company, and they’ll retain an equity interest via AOL Ventures.

This is pretty much in line with what he told Erick during an interview last week. During that interview he distanced himself from the acquisition: “I was not here during the acquisition of Bebo. Social networking was an unclaimed category, and growing quickly.” The reason he placed it in AOL Ventures is so that it can “focus on improving the consumer product,” he said. Armstrong added that one of the purposes of AOL Ventures is “to keep things on track that have not been on track. ”

But he noted that there is another purpose for AOL Ventures as well. In areas where product synergies “have not been realized, it gives us an opportunity to take it out of AOL, to make it groomed, and maybe attract outside investment.” It was pretty clear he was talking about Bebo.

AOL acquired Bebo in early 2008 for $850 million. But the property has languished since then and it has not been integrated much at all into AOL proper. Bebo had 8.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. in June, 2009, 20 percent down from its peak in March, 2009 (comScore). Globally, it is holding up better, with 24.2 million uniques in May, 2009 down 12 percent since March, 2009. But if Facebook is worth $6 billion to $10 billion, Bebo might still be able to get a decent valuation if it can hold onto its users.

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The future of media is algorithmic aggregation, at least that is the approach Future US is taking. The U.S. subsidiary of Future PLC, and publisher of such niche magazines as Nintendo Power, Guitar World, and Maximum PC, is adopting a different approach online than simply putting its print articles on the Web. Instead, it has launched dozens of news aggregation and discovery sites called “Blips” that are a combination of Techmeme and Digg. The Blips collect topical stories from across the Web and present the headlines in discussion clusters like you’d see on Techmeme, but stories can also then be voted up the page like on Digg.

There are about 40 different Blips on various topics, including TechBlips, EarthBlips, and WrestlingBlips. All of them are accessible from Future’s online portal, DailyRadar (which also houses the magazine content under games, music, tech, entertainment, and sports tags). Future has been launching Blips quietly since last summer, and they now account for 9.3 million of DailyRadar’s 27 million monthly unique visitors (which is up from about 12 million uniques a year ago before the Blips sites were added). These are internal numbers. ComScore shows 11.4 million uniques worldwide in March, 2009 up from 6.4 million last September.

The Blip sites are based on Future’s $3 million acquisition of BallHype last year. Now Future is rolling out about half a dozen new Blips every month. The underlying technology evaluates 26,000 different news sources, blogs, video sites, and photo sites to create topical Blips. Once a source is white-listed by an editor or added by a reader, it then becomes part of the mix. Stories are clustered together, with the placement of headlines determined by a combination of links, votes, and age (newer stories rank higher).

I am not convinced the Blip strategy will make a meaningful difference for Future or offset the downward spiral in print advertising, but it is an interesting attempt at adaptation. TechBlip is not going to displace TechMeme any time soon, but most of the other Blips address under-served or highly-focused niches: AnimeBlips, CricketBlips, CraftBlips, GuitarWorldBlips, MommyBlips, etc. Niche news aggregation is one thing, but then aggregating the aggregators gives Future the scale to sell ads across all of the Blips. On the other hand, the Blips are so targeted running ads across the network might not always make sense. If you are targetting mommies, you are probably not interested in reaching anime aficionados.

To show off the technology, DailyRadar has an interactive Trendmap showing which tags and keywords are peaking on the site. You can create Trendmaps for different broad categories and grab it as a widget, which I’ve done below:

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