AOL Seeing Strong Site Traffic Growth, Top Ad Network Reach

AOL’s programming sites (Money & Finance, News, Sports, Health, Food, Music, Games, and Moviefone, among others) hit an all time high in high in unique visitors and traffic in March, the company says. Page views to the sites are up 35% over the last year and unique visitors up 11% to 56 million (AOL as a whole draws 209 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore).

As a whole, the properties have had six consecutive months of unique visitor and page view growth.

Why the surge? AOL (TWX) attributes it to a year long rebranding and redesign effort, noting that every key vertical site has been redesigned (see our coverage of AOL Finance, for example, and the almost immediate traffic surge that followed).

Many of the programming sites have dropped the AOL brand altogether. We wrote recently about the launch of Switched, their technology network. Black Voices, an African American culture and news site, and Assylum, a men-focused site, are other examples.

AIM, MapQuest, AOL Music, AOL Television, Black Voices, TMZ and Asylum are No. 1 in their respective categories, based on unique visitor counts from Comscore. AOL Money & Finance, Real Estate, Moviefone, Women, Health and AOL Latino are all in the top three spots compared to competitors.

Also see news of AOL’s acquisition today of fantasy sports site Fleaflicker, which it is integrating into AOL Sports.

AOL is monetizing all of this content through Platform-A, which recently became the top U.S. advertising network by reach. In March 170,537 U.S. Internet users (91% of the total audience) visited a site represented by Platform-A. Yahoo and Google, by contrast, reached just 85% and 81%, respectively. More on AOL’s advertising plans here.

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Comments

[JachNightingale]

Yes I’m not surprised – my perception is that AOL is quietly doing some new stuff (especially with wholesale video distribution) that’s gone largely unnoticed. They seem to have some video search and indexing tools, that are powerful and proprietary.