The top bullet points out of yesterday’s TWX earnings: cable, great; AOL, ad growth promising, overall disappointing. But Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, preferring to focus on the growth side, sees progress. This time last year: no portal, no free e-mail, no sense of how advertisers would respond. Less than one year after the AOL.com launch, ad revenues are up 26 percent, 107 million average monthly uniques visit the AOL network, AOL.com is in the “top three or four networks” and AIM Pages is rolling out.
His conclusion: “I feel pretty good about how we’ve done, and how we’re doing. A year ago, if you’d woken me up in the middle of the night and said, Quick, what will AOL’s ad revenue be in Q1 ’06, I would have answered, “Well, that would require me giving you what they call ‘guidance,’ and I can’t and won’t do that.” But honestly, I don’t think I would have said even to myself, “We’ll be growing almost as fast as Yahoo! and nearly four times faster than MSN.”
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