Difficult times are afoot for Aol, with their Q4 advertising earnings 30% lower than last year. However, things aren’t completely gloomy: Aol’s user base is still one of the most valuable on a per-user basis.
We took a quick peek at the ad click rates of the major search engines, as we have multiple times in the past, and found that Aol users still click on ads about 3 times more often than Googlers.
The Aol braintrust maintains that the decline in overall revenue is due to the company working its way back into health, and is part of a process of getting worse in order to get better. We can’t really argue; the value of Aol’s user base should be a big help in bringing in the large brand advertisers they’re targeting.
It should be noted, too, that both Yahoo and Bing users click on ads more often than Google users; the Bingahoo team is shaping up to be a big player, both in the amount and quality of traffic sent.
The new proposed ‘AOL Way’ leaked recently might help monetize traffic from one perspective, but might also affect content quality as they try to crank out volume.