AOL Announces Expansion of Publishing Unit with the Creation of Mediaglow....

After a year of strong growth for its programming efforts, AOL announced today a series of significant developments that will dramatically expand, reposition and monetize its digital publishing business in 2009. Over the past year, AOL's programming unit has seen page views climb 40% year-over-year, engagement increase 20% year-over-year and its audience grow to 70 million unduplicated users.* Anchoring today's announcement is the creation of a new AOL business unit, MediaGlow, which will centralize AOL's entire publishing efforts, with the goal of greatly expanding the unit's global reach in the coming year.
Today's announcement also completes AOL's transformation to an advertising supported business. Over the past 18 months AOL has announced the formation of Platform-A, the largest domestic digital advertising platform, which uniquely maximizes online outreach for advertisers, as well as the creation of People Networks, the company's social media unit, which leverages the power of community properties such as Bebo, AIM and ICQ to reach an audience of more than 92 million unduplicated users worldwide.* MediaGlow and its publishing assets will now join Platform-A and People Networks as the third core business for AOL.

“Our vision was to rebuild AOL into three core businesses -- publishing, advertising and social media. With the launch of MediaGlow, we have completed our goal in less than 18 months," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL. “AOL now efficiently delivers the most relevant and engaging content and is able to uniquely maximize display advertising opportunities for advertisers and publishers across the Web. MediaGlow provides us with the ability to extend our publishing success and puts AOL in a very strong position for the future."

“Gone are the days when one general portal or social networking site addressed the needs of all consumers. Today's fragmented online environment requires programming that targets people's passion points at scale across a range of unique sites," said Ron Grant, AOL's President and COO. “Make no mistake, AOL has become a true digital content company. Over the past year, we have mastered the art of producing high-quality vertical and niche programming at scale. Now by centralizing and investing in this infrastructure, we will ensure that we are maximizing our potential for monetization."

The creation of MediaGlow comes on the heels of a highly successful 2008 for AOL's publishing unit, which has been led by Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programming for AOL. Wilson will now lead MediaGlow as President of the new business unit, directing not only the publishing unit, but a new infrastructure that will include global outreach and AOL's vast array of commerce-related sites.

Under Wilson's leadership, AOL rebuilt its flagship portal, AOL.com, and its entire network of vertical sites, while at the same time rapidly developing and launching more than a dozen new targeted content sites in the past year. In addition, during this short time period, the Programming team has built a vast infrastructure of world class talent, including editors, content creators and industry experts.

This effort has brought a significant new audience to AOL's slate of Web brands and has driven record-setting engagement metrics. In 2008, unique visitors to AOL's programming content sites grew to 70 million unduplicated users, with page views climbing 40% year-over-year and engagement growing 20% year-over-year. In addition, the influx of new consumers and deeper audience engagement levels provided AOL with double-digit increases in vertical content advertising revenue year-over-year in Q3 2008, and has brought in new advertisers such as Chili's, Wal-Mart, Schick, Old Spice and Motorola.

“2008 has been a truly historic year for AOL Programming because we became brand builders," said Bill Wilson, President of MediaGlow. “Few people outside of AOL would have believed a year ago that our sites would now be in the top positions in nearly every important programming category, but in a very short time we have created a successful, nimble and valuable business property for AOL. From our reinvented AOL.com to our vertical content sites, we are creating experiences that successfully reach key demographics and provide unique, relevant and valuable content to consumers and solutions for advertisers. As an ad-supported company, this is a huge asset. We are very excited to push our efforts to a whole new level with the establishment of MediaGlow and are now in a position to take our successful formula global."

In conjunction with today's announcement, AOL announced two important publishing developments:

MediaGlow will continue its aggressive momentum in the development of the new AOL.com, and its vertical Web sites focused on passion points, with the goal of creating over 30 editorially curated sites in 2009. A sample of specific categories includes: expanding AOL News and AOL Sports into a variety of newly created niche-oriented news and sports sites; building on the success of its highly successful Asylum site with new, male–oriented, 18-34 year old targeted brands; creating new sites focused on areas such as Reality Television, Soap Operas, Horror Films, Jazz and Heavy Metal; and launching a new pop culture site aimed at kids. In addition to these newly curated sites, MediaGlow will also maximize the technology of acquired companies Relegence and Sphere and begin an unprecedented effort to build thousands of medium and long-tail focused automated sites in 2009 and 2010, which will efficiently continue AOL's growth position in publishing.

MediaGlow will add to its infrastructure two state-of-the-art studios, located in AOL Headquarters in New York City and its offices in Los Angeles. MediaGlow Studios will provide new video production capabilities from hi-def video to complete editing and encoding. The studios will also be used to shoot original video productions that will now be distributed globally. Productions to be developed and produced through the MediaGlow Studios include original programming developed by AOL -- Moviefone's Unscripted, AOL Music's Sessions, AOL Living's Trade Secrets branded entertainment shows, Spinner's The Interface and AOL Television's Outside the Box.

About AOL
AOL is a global Web services company that operates some of the most popular Web destinations, offers a comprehensive suite of free software and services, runs one of the largest Internet access businesses in the U.S., and provides a full set of advertising solutions. A majority-owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., AOL LLC and its subsidiaries have operations in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia. Learn more at AOL.com.
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