Weren’t you the least bit curious about the deal between AOL and Verizon? At first I could not figure out why on earth these two companies merged. While most people scoff at the mention of AOL (“You’ve got mail!” was so 1990’s), its deal with Verizon could create a force to be reckoned with within the tech world – a force that is arguably much-needed in the face of Google’s digital ad market share.
AOL
While everyone was paying attention to Google, Facebook, and the like, AOL bought up a number of tech companies and relaunched them all under one moniker, streamlining the advertising process and allowing companies to target their consumers in a handful of cohesive ways.
Alan Wolk’s article “Verizon’s AOL Deal Is So Money And The Media Still Doesn’t Know It” helped to shed light on the reason for the merger – big money. Believe it or not, AOL is responsible for a solid percentage of the internet’s video streaming (third behind YouTube and Facebook) and offers extremely competitive video ad impressions because of its ability to target audiences successfully. (For example, AOL delivered 4 billion ad impressions in the month of November, 2013.)
Verizon
Verizon, as we well know, is a fully-integrated digital company, offering mobile, internet, and television services with its own solid platform on each. While normally mobile advertising proves difficult for companies and advertisers because of the lack of cookies, Verizon is able to gather all kinds of data about the way people use mobile that other companies are not necessarily privy to.
Together
With AOL’s targeting prowess and Verizon’s ability to show content to a user on any device at any time, the deal between the two companies is shaping up to be a digital advertising powerhouse that even Google might be hard-pressed to replicate. Taking both AOL and Verizon’s strengths and combining them might offer Google just the competition it needs in the future. Considering they own the infrastructure to deliver the ads already, they are ahead of Google because Google’s Fiber isn’t available everywhere.
Comcast is going to buy Yahoo next. I’ll put money on it.
Inspiration for this post came from one of our contractors, Jeremy Silva.