NEWS: Cha-Ching! AOL Cashes In

by Laurie Sullivan, Thursday, Mar 6, 2008 5:00 AM ET

"The first company that effectively figures out how to optimize advertising yields from Web sites will be in a position to increase its valuation multiple folds," says David Liu, AOL's SVP for social media, messaging and home pages. "We're all making good money on portals and search. The next area is to optimize the yield in social network sites." ...

Making revenue-sharing possible, AOL Wednesday launched the AIM 2.0 Developers program, providing free access to the application source code required to build the instant messaging service into sites and applications.

More than 235,000 third-party developers have signed on to the program since AOL launched Open AIM in 2006. The AIM service has enabled developers to create and integrate applications into the instant messaging platform that let users send buddies money, or alerts to notify when friends post new pictures and videos.

Ed: AIM and Platform-A are now open platforms allowing third-party developers to make money from advertising.