AOL Set to Swamp us With 30 New Websites

It seems that AOL wants to make 2008 its best year ever after they recently announced that they want to launch 12 new sites over the coming six months.

AOL Executive Vice President of Programming, Bill Wilson told Bloomberg that AOL wants "to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can." Ultimately it's all about numbers; more web properties should equal more traffic and more advertising revenue.

The next step in their plan is to beat the total number of sites they released in 2007, which included Asylum and Spinner, by launching another 20 to 30 by the end of this year.

There are some out there though who are a little skeptical of this plan. VentureBeat puts across a strong point to this new strategy: is this a strategy of quantity over quality?

There will no doubt be an increase in the quantity of sites which will be great for AOL as it should result in an increase in traffic.

However, it begs the question... will the quality of these new sites be at the same standard as existing AOL sites? You would hope that the quality of these new sites doesn't fall below par simply to ensure they are launched by the end of the year deadline. I guess we will find out in due course.

Posted by Courtney Mills at 4:08 AM GMT