The Battle for AOL Heats Up - Who Will Grab AOL?

According to BusinessWeek Online, “AOL hopes that by combining ad sales over AOL Web properties and MSN, which attracts about 114 million unique monthly visitors, it would top Yahoo, with 121 million unique monthly visitors. But even without such a move, AOL is expected to increase ad revenues to $1.35 billion this year, vs. $1 billion last year, according to Internet analyst Richard Greenfield of Fulcrum Global Partners.”  This is happening right when AOL was planning a re-launch of its AOL.com portal to make it more widely available to non-subscribers, a lot more content to the portal that was previously only available to subscribers.

Currently, AOL Search is 80% powered by Google, as the result of an agreement made in 2002, replacing Overture’s search, which was acquired by Yahoo.  No one knows, except perhaps AOL and Google, how long the tenure of this agreement is, but considering AOL sold its entire stake in Google, I’m willing to guess it’s fairly short.

Some analysts consider the possibility that this wouldn’t be a merger at all.  Tim Arango, a reporter for the New York Post says, "Under the plan being considered, Microsoft would pay some money to Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture. While the deal could fall apart, the companies are hopeful they can wrap it up within the next couple of months. ... The media giant has also had discussions with both Yahoo! and Google over a sale or venture with AOL, according to a source close to Time Warner." (Arango’s report comes from two unidentified "sources familiar with the matter".)

Whether we believe that an AOL-MSN merger or cooperation will happen, or that Google will swoop in and secure its place as King of the Search Engines with its own co-op plans; it’s just too soon to say.  The ramifications either way are bound to shake up the search industry and very well could have SEOs crawling back to square one.  Until that day, however, we’ll just keep one eye open, and just do the best we can.