Full screen pop-up?
Easy come, easy go, a million pounds in ad revenue at AOL
Turning off the homepage take over ad.
Back in 2000 portals offered users the simplest way to access the web. AOL was mailing out CD’s to the public and they were subscribing to AOL to get access to the internet. AOL was for most people in the UK an ISP.
But it also had its own browser and content. AOL had a large content team, creating a range channels and made money out of serving adverts along with the story.
Sadly no-one really looked at the content as when you launched AOL, the customer was served with a full screen banner ad, obscuring the homepage.
So no one saw any of the content.
They then used the AOL browser or another browser to surf the internet.
I argued that we should stop serving the front page take over add and then the users would see the homepage, engage in the content and the lost revenue on the full screen take over would be replaced by the revenue from users actually exploring the AOL channels content.
The loss of revenue from not serving the front page full screen take over would be made up for by the revenue from the adverts served with the content.
I wasn’t aware of the revenue the company got from the full screen take over ads on the front page. But some one from sales appeared at my desk and told me the ads were staying as we didn’t want to loose hundreds of thousands if not a million in ad revenue.
Flexible homepage layouts
Making a million pound homepage.
The flip side was that when we redesigned the homepage CMS we built it around the serving of adverts.
Nowadays this would seem trivial. But the homepage had fixed sized slots for adverts. So when the inventory had sold out in a particular ad slot Aol had to run internal promo’s. From which they earned no revenue.
The solution was a homage grid that allowed for skyscraper ads and 360 ads and other formats to be interchangeable.
AOL’s homepage content modules adapted to fit around the ad format. We didn’t have to run internal adverts.
Our then head of UK content proclaimed that we’d created the million pound homepage. I learnt that in a volume game a lot of small changes adds up very quickly.