AOL Buys Buy.at
By Christopher Nickson
February 06, 2008
Just when you thought it was all about a few big players, AOL pops up and spends money to expand its business.
You might well have forgotten about AOL in the welter of major names buying everything in sight over the last couple of years. But the company is still there, battling on. It’s now purchased affiliate marketing network Buy.at – its fifth purchase in a little over a year, E-Commerce Times has reported. It will become add a network affiliate component to AOL’s Advertising.com and Platform A online marketing organizations. The terms of the deal weren’t revealed.
Some analysts see affiliate marketing programs as a wave of the future. They help drive traffic to merchant sites, but only gain income when someone makes a purchase. Buy.at has not only developed a search engine that allows retailers to customize their products on affiliate pages, it’s also come up with solutions for social networking pages as affiliate partnerships.
The purchase will extend AOL’s European reach, since Buy.at us based both in the US and the UK. More than that, it signals that AOL is continuing to grow and remain a force, even if it can no longer compete on quite the same playing field as the big boys.