AOL announced today a series of significant developments that will dramatically expand, reposition and monetize its digital publishing business in 2009. Anchoring today’s announcement is the creation of a new AOL business unit, MediaGlow, which will centralize AOL’s entire publishing efforts, with the goal of greatly expanding the unit’s global reach in the coming year.
This move also completes AOL’s transformation to an advertising supported business. MediaGlow and its publishing assets will now join Platform-A and People Networks as the third core business for AOL.
In conjunction with today’s announcement, AOL announced two important publishing developments:
• MediaGlow will continue its aggressive momentum in the development of the new AOL.com, and its vertical Web sites focused on passion points, with the goal of creating over 30 editorially curated sites in 2009. In addition to newly curated sites, MediaGlow will also maximize the technology of acquired companies Relegence and Sphere and begin an unprecedented effort to build thousands of medium and long-tail focused automated sites in 2009 and 2010, which will efficiently continue AOL’s growth position in publishing.
* MediaGlow will add to its infrastructure two state-of-the-art studios, located in AOL Headquarters in New York City and its offices in Los Angeles. MediaGlow Studios will provide new video production capabilities from hi-def video to complete editing and encoding. The studios will also be used to shoot original video productions that will now be distributed globally.
Originally posted on January 12, 2009 @ 12:24 pm