Press ReleaseShahid Khan, Partner at IBB Consulting, comments on AOL in Business WeekPrinceton, NJ, February 7, 2008 — Excerpt from Business Week article "Breaking AOL in Two": Another area where an AOL pairing would help Google is editorial content. Consider personal finance, where Yahoo and Microsoft would combine two already strong portals. In December, 2007, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money had a combined 24.2 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore. AOL Money & Finance had a respectable 13.5 million visitors, but Google Finance was an also-ran with 782,000 visitors. "Google is very much a techie site, and AOL has more consumer-friendly editorial," says Shahid Khan, a partner at media consultancy IBB Consulting, who believes a Google-AOL tie-up makes great sense. "The rich content on AOL could help Google compete." In addition, Google could benefit from AOL's ad-network technologies. Working in concert, the two companies could more effectively place and generate revenue from ads on sites across the Web. AOL would also give Google the upper hand with instant messaging, one of the main reasons people use AOL. Google already provides search capabilities to AOL users. Getting together would let Google more fully partake of the revenue generated by ads placed alongside those search results, which currently are divided between the two. There's no question that Google, with its hoard of cash, would easily be able to afford AOL, which when separated from its dial-up business, could have a value ranging from $15 billion to $20 billion, say IBB's Khan. About IBBInteractive Broadband Consulting Group, LLC (IBB) is a boutique consulting firm that serves leading Broadband related product and service providers in the Cable, Mobile and Media industries. IBB combines world-class deep industry and domain knowledge with extensive business, technology and operational expertise to rapidly maximize the value that growth and efficiency initiatives deliver to client businesses. Over the years, IBB had helped the leading cable, technology and content companies conceive, build and grow some of the most significant strategic, marketing and operational initiatives in the industry. The company has offices in Princeton, NJ and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. More information about IBB is available at www.ibbconsulting.com. For Media:PR Contact |
