WebProNews

AOL announced today the creation of a new business unit, MediaGlow that will centralize the company's publishing efforts, with the goal of expanding its global reach in 2009.

MediaGlow joins AOL's advertising platform, Platform-A along with its social media effort, Peoples Networks to become the third core business of the company.

AOL says over the past year its page views have increased 40 percent, engagement increased 20 percent and its audience grew to 70 million monthly visitors.

"Our vision was to rebuild AOL into three core businesses -- publishing, advertising and social media. With the launch of MediaGlow, we have completed our goal in less than 18 months," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL.

"AOL now efficiently delivers the most relevant and engaging content and is able to uniquely maximize display advertising opportunities for advertisers and publishers across the Web. MediaGlow provides us with the ability to extend our publishing success and puts AOL in a very strong position for the future."

Bill Wilson
MediaGlow

Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programming for AOL, will now be President of MediaGlow. Under Wilson AOL rebuilt its portal AOL.com while launching more than a dozen new targeted content sites in the past year.

"From our reinvented AOL.com to our vertical content sites, we are creating experiences that successfully reach key demographics and provide unique, relevant and valuable content to consumers and solutions for advertisers," said Wilson." As an ad-supported company, this is a huge asset."

AOL operates around 75 sites and plans to add more than 30 sites in 2009 focused on reality television, soap operas, horror films and the launch of a new pop culture site geared towards kids.