Aol's $500 Million Business And Ad.com; Centralizing Digital At NPR; IAB's Rothenberg Speaks

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Aol’s $500 Million Business

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld covers Aol Investor day and – did you know? – “AOL’s advertising platforms, which are grouped under the Advertising.com business, is now a $500 million business, the company revealed today at its Investor Day in New York City. The Advertising.com Group is a new business unit inside AOL, which includes six separate products….” Ad.com is one part. Read about the five others. PaidContent’s David Kaplan covers more on Investor Day here including developments around Aol’s hyperlocal efforts known as Patch. Read it.

Big Publisher Centralizing Digital

The Wall Street Journal says that National Public Radio is looking to help streamline local NPR operations ‘cuz digital is too expensive city by city. Adams writes, “The nonprofit news organization is trying to persuade its 268 member stations to outsource more of their online operations to NPR by offering them a suite of digital services it says will help them raise money and expand their websites beyond archived radio programs into breaking news, blogs and other material.” Read more (subscription). NPR is U.S. government funded and anything it can do to save cash, it will, given current sentiment for cutting budgets and U.S. debt.

Performance Difference: CPA Vs. CPC

In an interview on the Inside AdWords blog, Matthew Mierzejewski of paid search marketing agency Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG) talks Google Product Listing Ads. Mid-way through, Mierzejewski answers a question about results between clients who use CPA and CPC priding: “We don’t see much difference in terms of conversion rates between CPC and CPA pricing. Though, in general, clients who use CPC pricing have been able to get more volume than those who are using CPA pricing. We like the idea of CPA pricing, but if we optimize our CPC bids we’re able to meet our ROI goals just as easily. It’s all a matter of testing and optimizing.” Read more.

Mr. Rothenberg Speaks

Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney summarizes a teleconference he had with the IAB chief Randall Rothenberg regarding his views about digital: “1) Mr. Rothenberg believes that Online Video consumption is now a norm, and consumers are becoming accustomed to watching “snack”-sized, 5-minute long professional videos online. He noted that Hulu recently had an upfront for marketers and Hulu was showing original snack sized content created for the online network. 2) Social and Mobile are now key drivers of growth. Facebook has approx. 700MM users worldwide, and global mobile Internet users should grow from 657MM in 2010 to 1.4B by 2013; and 3) Internet advertising material, – in 2010, it was $26B – which is now bigger than Magazines and Radio advertising, and is quickly closing the gap with Newspapers.”

Making Coin With Facebook Ads

Last week, Ad Age’s Edmund Lee profiles Ad Parlor, founded in 2008, and a two-person venture that has made a living off of Facebook advertising. Lee writes, “After a year, AdParlor started booking ‘hundreds of thousands in revenue’ every month, according to [Ad Parlor] CEO Mr. Fazal, ‘when we started seeing some real money.’ The two founders moved out of their parents’ houses, found office space and hired a few more people to handle all the work coming their way.” Sounds like early AdWords days. Ch-ching.