Landscape Portrait

Via Folio, AOL prez sez:

“All e-media content will be available on-demand in five years.”

AOL Media President Michael Kelly...surveyed the digital media landscape coming off a particularly busy year for AOL in 2005—one that included a transition from a subscription-based model to a free one, AOL’s $25 million buy of Weblogs Inc., and Google’s purchase of a $1 billion stake in AOL. He broadly outlined the future of online advertising and factors driving its growth—like search and consumer-generated content. Kelly pointed to the popularity of myspace.com, facebook.com, craigslist and AOL’s Instant Messenger as powerful examples of consumer-produced content.

“It’s a little frightening,” Kelly said of myspace.com. “It’s also very cool.” Craiglist’s 19 employees, he said, are generating $25 million in revenue by creating a “powerful emotional” connection to its users, something magazine publishers have in print, but in large part have yet to figure out online.

Kelly said that online video-on-demand has revolutionized the way marketers—and content producers—look at the Web. AOL’s partnership with last year’s Live Aid Concert, he said, generated 90,000,000 VOD viewings after the concert. That type of scale “makes your brain hurt a little bit.”