If they're evenly spaced, a launch will occur every 15 or so days. If they're not, well, there's no telling. But regardless of the specifics, Bill Wilson, AOL's executive vice president of programming, has promised that his company will launch 12 new sites in the next six months.
According to Wilson, "We want to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can." No elaboration about the types of consumers or the content of the sites followed.
To some people, Wilson's words might sound like little more than a promise of additional spaghetti; AOL's been seen as flailing as the portal business dries up. And, given the whole lack-of-specifics thing, we can't really reject that interpretation.
AOL's not in as bad a shape as pessimists might imagine, however; numbers suggest that traffic to its niche sites grew quite a bit in January. Also, after we published an article on that period, a senior communications manager contacted us with decent-looking data from the previous four months.
Meh. Anyway, Gillian Wee first reported Wilson's 12-in-six-months quote, and she also pointed out, "New York-based Time Warner's 24 percent drop last year made it the 10th-worst performer in the Standard & Poor's 100 Index." AOL no doubt wants to reverse this trend.
AOL Launches New Radio Offering AOL Launches In MexicoAOL Launches Enterprise Federation Program To Connect Corporate UsersAOL Launches Week-long Series of Activities in Seattle AOL Launches XdriveAOL Launches New HomepageAOL Launches China Portal In USAOL Launches Integrated Ad PlatformAOL Launches inStoreAOL Launches Mobile Developer Program 
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aol new site launches
Doug, I agree with you. Your post on AOL from 2/12 clearly points out the site re-launches and new site launches in 2007 are having a positive impact on traffic growth for AOL's O&O web sites. In addition to the ones you mention, they also took back their Health site from WebMD in May 2007 and as of January have the 3rd Health site in the U.S. as ranked by Comscore with over 100 million pae views; a strong start for a site that did not exist a year ago. You also in your post did not mention Black Voices, which has been ranked consistently #1 in the African American category way ahead of Black Planet and others. Everyone knows consumer behavior online is fragmenting and clearly AOL is leanining into that and creating many front doors for consumers while other portals are trying to be the start place.
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