AOL Reports Success of Their Niche Websites and Launches Two More
by
on September 25, 2008,
Today AOL is announcing launch of two more niche websites - Lemondrop for women and PopEater about pop culture. Since last year AOL launched over 20 websites focused on various topics popular among internet users and these two is the latest addition to solidify the success AOL is reporting for the programming sites.
The two websites launched today really sound like that should have been launched much earlier since they are focused on the topics that generally receive significant attention from web audience and are quite easy to monetize as well.
Lemondrop is a typical website targeted at women in their 20s and early 30s: it focuses on various lifestyle topics women generally are supposed to find interesting - news, relationships, sex, fashion, pop culture and even politics (in a feminine way as well, of course). To tell you the truth, I have always failed to understand why news or politics necessary need to be crafted for women to suite our tastes but it looks like I simply don’t get something obvious for internet marketers as success of such websites is usually incredible.
Besides, it is already a general knowledge that websites targeted at women only are very appealing to advertisers because women are often in charge of all the buying decisions when it comes to household goods, food, health and personal care products. The ambitious goal Lemondrop looks like intended to achieve is repeating the success of Asylum - AOL’s lifestyle website for men that is number 1 in its respective category with 4.1 million uniques in August according to AOL (after launch less than a year ago last December).
PopEater is aimed to become the main AOL destination site for all the entertainment and pop culture related news. Basically this one is all the entertainment articles extracted from AOL News and published in a centralized location.
Both new websites look very much like high-grade niche blog networks (along with social features to comment and share posts, vote on questions and such) focused the topics visitors must care about if they are interested in this particular niche. The two new properties are to be monetized with both display and contextual advertising from AOL’s Platform-A advertising network, obviously.
In addition to launching the two new content sites AOL is also reporting traffic growth for all its programming sites: compared to last August such properties drew 5% more unique visitors while the pageviews increased by more than 100%. This is quite an impressive growth, especially when it comes to properties that can actually generate revenue for the company.
I can’t help but admire AOL’s politics of separating web properties devoted to very niche topics (usually those where advertisers are quite willing to pay for both attention and clicks) and making full use of them. And if such practices prove to be efficient for AOL, we will have to admit that to bring the most users it is not actually necessary to develop the coolest technology - collecting content on the right topics in the right places and selling ads alongside this content may be the road to success.
