AOL just announced it is combining all of its publisher products into One (AOL)

AOL

AOL is continuing its drive to simplify its business. The company's CMO recently announced that she is considering ditching the "AOL" brand name and it just joined forces with Taboola to take on Facebook's walled garden.

Now the tech giant is merging its "billion dollars" worth of publishing products into one platform, it announced on Monday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership summit.

This is important because it offers an alternative to the walled garden approach of Google and Facebook. Publishers will be able to opt in to specific technologies on the service, rather than the being "locked in an all-or-nothing." The new platform will focus on mobile and video products.

"Publishers want to have a more open relationship with us and we're committing to this mantra," Tim Mahlman, president of publisher platforms at AOL, told Business Insider. "The publishers we work with, more and more, are getting inundated with a number of companies telling them they have products to increase their yield, to grow their inventory. It became kind of a mess to be honest."

"The aha moment for us last year was realizing that we have a billion dollars of acquisitions in AOL that are dedicated to publishers. Instead of selling them seven different products, why aren't we doing something similar to what the advertisers did and go to the publishers with one solution?"

The new platform will help publishers with "audience engagement and analytics, content distribution and revenue management."

AOL already works with over 75,000 publishers, according to Mahlman. But whether One by AOL is a success will be measured by the depth of this involvement. "The target that I have from my boss ... is going to measured by the amount of companies leveraging not just one but two, three or five products that are in our portfolio. That's a metric of how deep we get with our publishers," Mahlman said.

AOL also announced on Monday that it has acquired AlephD — a programmatic platform "specializing in publisher analytics and price floor optimization."

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