AOL

comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In September 2009, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 64.9 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.4 percent market share, representing a slight gain versus August.

September 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in September with 64.9 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (18.8 percent), and Microsoft Sites (9.4 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 3.0 percent. Read the full story

AOL’s Platform-A announced that the new AOL.com homepage is delivering advertisers record performance on their homepage advertising and is also driving increased consumer reach and engagement. Since the homepage redesign was launched in September 2008, advertising click-through rates on the primary 300×250 ad banner rose 30%, according to internal metrics, a double-digit increase that shows consumers are increasingly clicking on AOL.com homepage advertising. In addition, the redesign is driving stronger consumer usage: total unique visitors and average daily visitors each are up 13% and total minutes grew by 29%, compared to one year ago, according to the November 2008 comScore Media Metrix Report. Read the full story

Bebo today made it easier for Internet users to manage their online life by providing users with a one-stop “Social Inbox” that combines e-mail, social networking and media recommendations in one easy-to-use interface. Designed to allow consumers to organize their lives online, Bebo’s Social Inbox makes it simple for users to keep in touch with the information and people who are important to them. The Social Inbox aggregates feeds and updates from Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, AIM and others, so users can see at-a-glance what’s going on in their online world. The new experience also offers one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, as well as user-selected media favorites, such as videos, music and photos. In addition, more than 100 million* users of AOL and AIM can now log directly into the Bebo service, http://www.bebo.com, using their existing screen names. Read the full story

The new AOL homepage is simple yet powerful and elegant. Not just that, it has also had a visitor increase of 13 percent. AOL’s Platforum-A mentioned that their new home page has delivered their home page advertisers excellent performance and has helped in driving increased number of consumers. Read the full story

Remember the Billionaire Carl Icahn? The limelight he tried to capture with Microsoft support? Guys, his game is not yet over! Icahn has opposed to sell part of Yahoo to former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller. How will he as he is been fed by Microsoft? Read the full story

Cisco is strengthening its plan to enter into the internet industry with the purchase of the messaging platform, Jabber. Cisco has already purchased WebEx, Securent, PostPath and IronPort. The Jabber acquisition will help Cisco enhance its services across multiple platforms by providing on-premise and on-demand solutions. Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice-president of the Collaboration Software Group stated “Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs.” He also stated that the acquisition will help extend the instant messaging service and make Cisco a interoperability benchmark.Jabber is a popular messaging platform and it is compatible with different systems and platforms. MS Office Com Server, AOL AIM, Google, Yahoo! And IBM Sametime can be used with Jabber. Employees of Jabber would become part of the Collaboration Software Group which consists of Ciscos most profitable businesses like the IOS network operating system, Unified Communications solutions, SaaS offering, policy management and network and service management.

U.S. has sort after Yahoo! Finance for information about economic conditions, general inflation and stocks. More than 18 Million visitors have accessed Yahoo! Finance in May making it the top financial news and research site.

According to comScore, a Internet research company, Yahoo! Finance topped the category followed by AOL Money & Finance with 15.2 million visitors. This is a 58 percent increase for Yahoo! And 48 percent increase for AOL when compared to their previous year.

Demographic Indicators

The report by comScore also reveals some interesting facts. 46 percent of unique visitors who accessed the financial news and research category were persons above the age of 50.

Also, 40% of the visitors had a house hold income of above $60,000. A large number of visitors have also been from large families with more than 5 people. This report portrays how families who have more financial responsibilities or needs keep themselves updated on today’s economic growth.

The recent site updates have helped AOL increase their site traffic with new traffic records. The sites page views increased a wooping 35 percent and unique visitors more than 11 percent making their total site hits to 56.5 million.

Sites which had a makeover were AOL News, AOL Sports and AOL Money & Finance. AOL Sports had a traffic hit of more than 148 percent.

Bill Wilson, AOL Vertical Programming executive vice president, said “Our strong growth is a direct result of rebuilding each and every one of our vertical Web sites over the past 12 months, with the goal of providing consumers highly relevant and rich experiences that focus on key passion points”.

These traffic increases should hopefully lift AOL from its revenue struggle and the fall in dial-up subscriptions.

Are you uncomfortable letting your kids search using popular search engines? Well, there are a whole lot of search engines for kids. These search engines filter out sites which are not suitable for kids. These kids search engines use its employees to manually filter out bad sites which are not suitable for children.
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After Yahoo, now it’s AOL which is open for a deal. The Time Warner company America Online acknowledged the weakness in business and is now open for combining AOL with any company which could provide the strongest and the most valuable configuration.

It should be noted that Chief Executive Officer, Jeffrey Bewkes had informed in February 2008 that Time Warner would give away AOL’s dying subscription business from the online content and advertising side.

Erick had reported that “this is code for a sale or IPO, or both. Time Warner should sell off the access business to a private equity shop and go full-steam ahead with its IPO plans for Platform A.”