Skip to main content

AOL is Changing its Name, Model, and Results

New York Times reports that AOL, which recently changed its name from America Online, is in the midst of transforming itself from a proprietary Internet service provider, with a large but dwindling number of dial-up subscribers, to an entertainment portal that makes money through online advertising.

The company has announced a flurry of deals this year. AOL has also reached an agreement with Katalyst Films, the California company founded by the actor Ashton Kutcher and the producer Jason Goldman that created the TV show "Beauty and the Geek."

Katalyst will develop five comedy series for AOL, each with at least 20 episodes. AOL already has a children's cartoon, "Princess Natasha," about a student who is also a secret agent, that has crossed from the Web to television, where it is shown on the Cartoon Network. And AOL has started In2TV, a free Web site showing old TV shows.

But the shift has not come without some pain. Among top entertainment portals, AOL was the only one to have a drop in page views at the end of last year, falling 15 percent in December from a year earlier, to 16.6 million page views, according to ComScore Networks, a consulting firm that measures Web use.

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....
Read more