I haven’t visited AOL.com in quite sometime (probably since I was 12 years old and using dial up) - so I was rather amazed to see that AOL looks identical to Yahoo:

Pretty pathetic AOL-Time Warner - you rip off the design of Yahoo (isn’t this copyright or Trademark infringement?) Regardless, I briefly looked over the monetization strategies of these home pages, and AOL hands down beats Yahoo. So who is more pathetic, AOL that rips of the design, or Yahoo who doesn’t know how to monetize? For example, under the main 300×250 banner ad on AOL there are “featured offers” and under the strange sized banner ad on Yahoo (isn’t it time to switch this to a standard 300×250 Yahoo?) is an offer to download Yahoo messenger. AOL doesn’t waste this space, but puts their AIM download link in the upper left portion of their page.  Additionally, AOL goes further below the fold and offers more content, but Yahoo has My Yahoo (which is possible the worst RSS reader out there), so once again AOL beats out Yahoo.

Yahoo, don’t worry we won’t pick on you too long - Google’s stock just dropped after announcing disappointing earnings. Oh wait, Google increased revenue 51% and Yahoo managed to decrease revenue by 24%; additionally Yahoo is laying off 1000 employees (while Google is hiring 1000 more) and making 2008 an “investment year”. Yahoo, please contact Banner Blindness if you need help growing a pair of balls so you can make 2008 a year of incredible growth and competitive elimination. Yahoo is clearly not getting it - they did make one positive move today: Terry Semel finally leaves Yahoo (he is proud of his accomplishments - hahaha, you ruined this company you Hollywood moron).

Independent thoughts:

Comparing the various SERPs, is it possible to ell which search engine optimization strategy will gain you the most benefits when targeting a major search engine? The advertising costs or payments from various engines like Google rival the payments from email marketing campaigns – and the funds generated from Adsense are partially determined by the web page design resources chosen in the website hosting control panel for shared customers.

Tags: AOL, copyright infringement, Earnings Report, google, Terry Semel, trademark infringement, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 9:06 pm
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