The Online Marketing Guy

Bill just posted this, and it’s great info:

http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/aol-to-change-name-to-tmz/

Seems that AOL is going to be changing their name to TMZ. If that sound familiar, it’s because TMZ.com is one of the hottest entertainment-related sites extant.

Ah, AOL - even YOU aren’t sure who you really are.

For the brand that is the Internet to millions, and has been described as ‘The Internet for Dummies’, I’m left to wonder how their user base will cope with the change. I mean, AOL makes it so simple for users, they hardly need to know anything about the online world.

Now, will they really wrap their heads around a brand change?

…and what does this mean for TMZ.com? Will they end up marginalized as simply a subsection of the Entertainment area of a new entity? Or will they be watered down and become ‘Entertainment for Dummies’ in the end?

This could really spell a unique opportunity. AOL has been sliding for a while now, and they’re so far gone in the real search race that maybe the time is now for them to look in a new direction.

Could they corner the market as a vertically integrated entertainment-only focused portal?

Tags: AOL, TMZ by searchgeek
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I’ve read two recent-ish posts on this topic. One was via the IAB from The Washington Post about AOL’s apparent jump to the top of the website pile because page views were no longer the dominant metric being used to track results.

Nielsen Scraps Web Page View Rankings

Back in February, USA Today penned this article on the page view as a dying stat…

New technologies make gauging Web ads’ effectiveness more difficult

Now, as Nielsen was tracking things using time-on-site to determine who’s the most popular site, Google fell, AOL jumped.

Makes perfect sense if time is the evaluator, and not page views. Folks go to Google, do their search and end up, quickly, at a site with the info they were looking for. AOL, on the other hand IS the Internet for millions of users. They know nothing outside the AOL bubble. It’s The Internet for Dummies and many folks like it.

So, does this mean the page view is dead as a metric? [Read more →]

Tags: Reality Check, Metrics, AOL by searchgeek
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