Tom Grubisich: December 2009 archive
New AOL's credibility threatened by editorial/advertising marriages
December 10, 2009
It's easy to poke fun at AOL's goofy corporate image campaign as the new Time Warner spinoff tries to look like a winner. My favorite among the "reveals" that are being rotated behind the new capital-lower-case "Aol." (please don't try to pronounce that phonetically) is this one:
If you wanted to visualize the impact of the AOL-Time Warner merger, wouldn't the result be something like this?
But much more important than image gimmickry is the value and integrity of AOL's content, which is spread among 80-some sites. Can the reborn company create a mosaic whole that is greater than the sum of all those parts?
Some of the 80 sites are quite respectable, editorially. Like AOL Money & Finance, or the blog Engadget, or the new Politics Daily. They're clearly run by pros. A few, like Mapquest, are struggling to stay competitive. Then there's Netscape, once the No. 1 browser (before Microsoft's Internet Explorer), which still has a ghostly presence in the AOL lineup.
But what I really wonder about are those blogs with the weird names and even weirder rationales for existence – like Lemondrop, Luxist and Holidash? More...
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