AOL Italia Goes Live

In May, I wrote about AOL’s ambitious plan to launch sites in 14 markets in just 18 months. Today, AOL launched its portal for Italy at www.aol.it.

AOL Italia

Now one might argue that AOL is too late to the game. Yahoo and Google and many locals are already entrenched in Italy. But I would argue that all it takes is one new killer app to pull a few million people to your portal. So it’s important to first have that portal in place.

As a Yahoo user, I’ve often wondered what it would take for me to dump it in favor of a new portal, such as AOL. Right now, AOL looks a lot like Yahoo, so I’m not sure there is any compelling reason to switch, other than the fact that I really detest Yahoo’s use of stock photos, as shown below:

Yahoo! stock photo

So I’m glad to see AOL going after Yahoo, not just here but abroad. What country will be next for AOL? Stay tuned to this blog for updates…

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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