AOL Launches Personal Finance and Photography Sites to Enhance its Ad Potential

Popular search engine AOL recently launched new websites related to personal finance and photography in order to augment its advertising opportunities by catering to the niche market.

As far as personal finance is concerned, the new WalletPop expands on a prevailing website of the same name by including alerts on money saving tips and the latest deals. Moreover, it also provides answers to queries submitted by the readers. On the other hand, Pixcetera is mainly focused on high-quality professional photography.

Similar to several other niche websites that AOL has launched in the past recent months, both WalletPop as well as Pixcetera play down the AOL brand, which has been associated for a long time with dial-up Internet access for people in spite of attempts to transform the firm into an ad business.

With efforts to generate additional advertising, AOL essentially needs to offset sinking revenues from its dwindling base of Internet access subscribers. Therefore, the company is creating a number of specialty websites, thereby breaking loose from a one-size-fits-all model and allowing each to set its own design as well as editorial tone.

One of the basic aims of WalletPop site is to address the monetary issues of real people, such as finding the best deals, debt management, insurance, savings, taxes, banking, retirement and many more, said AOL senior vice president Marty Moe.

Pixcetera looks forward to aggregate thousands of high-quality professional photographs and galleries, which are now spread across various AOL websites. Moreover, the image site will also comprise of recommendations for taking better photos and comments on trends in photography.

Finally, the good news for users is that AOL, which is a unit of Time Warner Inc., is providing both the websites without any charge.