AOL India fired 90% of its staff this March and they have shut down AOL.in as well. The site is inaccessible now (and if you are able to access it, you will be redirected to http://aol.coolage.in/). Aside, AOL has also shutdown Asylum.in, a lifestyle site targeted at Indian men (launched in 2008).
AOL India shutdown doesn’t come as a surprise – these are sites that had a difficult time building (organic) traffic and hence, monetization was probably a huge challenge.
While AOL (earlier) shamelessly copied Yahoo design, they didn’t get the basics right. A new domain (AOL.in) needs its own sweet time to build traffic and a basic lesson they should have derived from Yahoo is how Yahoo launches new properties and piggybacks on Yahoo.com domain,which has a much higher value in the world of search engines (including pagerank) (Y! India homepage: http://in.yahoo.com/, Y! India Local search: http://in.local.yahoo.com/ etc).
What about your AOL.in email? You can still access your aol.in email from http://webmail.aol.com.
The question is if AOL will launch a ‘content farm’ in India (in near future), given its newly acquired avatar?
RIP AOL.IN – Nobody will miss you. Hope you had some learnings from India.
PS: From traffic data, the site was shutdown around end of April/May 1st week.
[Hat tip: @phanirajkvs]
