When AOL bought us a month ago, we were promised a lot of things: autonomy, resources, inappropriately long corporate meetings, and fame. So far, AOL has come through on the first three. But fame, by which I mean homepage love on aol.com, had thus far eluded us. But today that changed. Boy did it ever.
Yesterday, we got word from our corporate overlords that they were likely to test a link to one of our stories on their homepage in the near future. Today, when scanning our referrer logs, we noticed something interesting. A massively huge tidal wave of traffic from aol.com.
Just how huge was this wave of traffic? Let’s put it this way: so far today, AOL is not only the number one referrer to TechCrunch, it’s tripling the number two: Twitter. That’s just from one little link to one story on a rotating tile on the homepage. It’s fairly amazing.
I point this out for two reasons. One, to boast about this awesome power we now possess. Two, it’s a great reminder of the power of the big boys — even the ones you don’t really think about anymore. Both AOL and Yahoo still have two of the most trafficked homepages on the web. While they may have fallen out of favor with the tech elite, the so-called “normals” seem to love them. I have to assume these are also the same people that click on web ads.
So, in all seriousness, I’ll now nicely ask AOL: thank you sir, may we have another?
[image: Universal Pictures]
AOL is a global advertising-supported Web company, with display advertising network in the U.S., a substantial worldwide audience, and a suite of popular Web brands and products. The company’s strategy focuses on increasing the scale and sophistication of its advertising platform and growing the size and engagement of its global online audience through leading products and programming. History of Aol: AOL was founded in the early 1980’s as Control Video Corp, with an online service, Gameline, for the Atari 2600 console. ...
TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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