NY Times Touts AOL’s Inflated Traffic; Ignores Internet Trickery Behind It

The NY Times’ David Carr writes about AOL’s transformation from gated-community ISP to content powerhouse. And while AOL deserves a ton of credit for righting a ship that appeared destined to to sink, a closer look at how the Internet giant gets its massive traffic numbers actually belies the true value of both content and traffic. Is all this focus on content part of a larger communications strategy in advance of Time Warner’s plans to spin-off AOL as a separate company?

Noting that 10 of Technorati’s top 100 blogs are owned or operated by the Internet giant, Carr writes in today’s NY Times about AOL’s great traffic and terrific content offering. It’s true that since evolving towards becoming primarily a media company just over two years ago, AOL has been successful in both developing compelling content in niche markets and attracting established journalists. But why ignore the real reasons behind their success: the “firehose” of traffic known as AOL’s welcome screen promotion, and that manufactured click-machine known as a “slide show”.

How does it work? Simply put AOL still enjoys an enormous userbase — Quantcast reveals that AOL.com has almost 60 million unique visits a month.  More importantly, they report that each month they receive an estimated 2.5 billion total visits. Which means that each user checks in on average over 30 times per month, presumably to check their email. As a result, the AOL homepage, or “welcome screen,” is incredibly effective for promoting the AOL-owned niche blogs and driving traffic their way.

But it’s not just where the traffic is coming from, but what it does when it gets there — many of these content areas have become particularly adept at manufacturing an enormous amount of “clicks” or “page views” by employing slide shows that get the user to click through to see ten or more images. Like “Take a Dip in Some Amazing Swimming Pools” or “Stars and Stripes Bikinis Indicate that God has Blessed America.” Not exactly the stuff of the Paris Review, but a great generator of traffic clicks.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of great content being created by AOL blogs, and Carr names some of the terrific journalists who now call AOL home (Todd Pruzan, Jeff Bercovici, Lynn Sweet and Carl Cannon among others). And the numbers that AOL puts forth in terms of unique visitors and page views is impressive.

But just how solid is a business model that relies on late-adapter surfing behavior? AOL email addresses are normally a sign that one hasn’t changed his or her Internet settings since joining the World Wide Web in 2002. And the slide show trickery is sure to be replaced by some other smoke and mirror – video?

The larger question is how this will be viewed by Wall Street when AOL is reported to be spun of from Time Warner in Q4? Will they cynically see through the Internet chicanery? Or will they just like big numbers? Size does matter after all. And perhaps this is something Carr should have addressed.

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