AOL and Facebook. Two different businesses, heading in two different directions.
First to the report that AOL, once the darling of the Internet in the 1990s, has suffered an 86% collapse in its profits.
Now that's an extraordinary number because it should have been an even bigger wipe out. As Peter Kafka at All Things Digital notes, it's mind boggling to think that there are 3.6 million people paying an average of $18 a month for a dial-up service!!
On the plus side, AOL's revenues from advertising inched up four per cent.
But so what? Compare that with the numbers from Facebook. Comscore reports that 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to US Internet users during the last quarter and that Facebook accounted for 346 billion of them.
In other words, Facebook accounted for one in every three online ads. That was double the number of ads it was running last year. It's bad news for everyone else, including the newspapers that need every bit of online revenue they can get to survive. It also makes AOL's figures look bad.
no comment untill now