The latter part of last year, AOL redesigned a number of its channel offerings including News, Sports and Money & Finance in an effort to increase engagement and traffic starting with AOL News in June 2007. According to a recent release by AOL, it appears that these changes are paying off. The redesign offers a cleaner design and more blog-like social platform than before which might have contributed to increases in key metrics like Page Views and Unique Visitors.
Today I received the following January 2008 metrics from AOL:
- AOL News (Redesigned June 2007): Increased Page Views 6% to 667 million and Unique Visitors 2% to 26.5 million
- AOL Sports (Redesigned July 2007): Sports had the 4th month of consecutive growth in Page Views as it grew 23% to 175 Million, while uniques are up 11%. Since redesign, has moved from 6th overall into 4th overall in the category.
- AOL Money & Finance (Redesigned November 2007): Unique Visitors increased 3%, to 13.9 million. In December we moved to 2nd place in the finance category, from number 3, where we remain and are moving closer to catching the top slot.
- AOL Music took the top stop in the music category in both total unique visitors and page views which grew 32% to 427 million.
- AOL Television jumped to #1 in unique visitors and saw page views grow 25% to 225 million.
- Moviefone finished the month with a record 17.4 million unique visitors, while page views jumped 81% to 359 million for a solid #2 ranking.
- Black Voices remained at the #1 spot which it has held for quite some time, while growing page views 6%.
- AOL Body moved up again to #3 spot in Health category, and we grew page views 25% to 109 Million.
- Asylum is only 2 months old and on a roll taking the #2 spot in the men's category and grew page views 158% and unique visitors 110%
The bottom line is, AOL channels Page Views were up 20 percent in January 2008. I know it is only one month but it is a heck of a start to a new year and it is tough to not to at least be intrigued by the positive start. CenterNetworks also covered the AOL metrics and added some perspective.
Sphere ItTrackBacks
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/431977/26040866
What specifically about the new designs do you think caused the uptake in traffic and engagement?
Posted by: Andy Roth | Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 10:09 AM
These metrics are very interesting. The whole AOL family needed a makeover. It will be interesting now to see if they can come to some agreement with Yahoo
Posted by: Steven Finch | Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 01:26 PM
AOL just plain sucked. This was long before any mention of "Web 2.0".
Posted by: Mindraker | Tuesday, March 04, 2008 at 05:26 AM