Spend ad money to make ad money seems to be the adage that America Online is following for the upcoming launch of its portal and current drive to switch from a subscription model to an advertising-based one. And in one of those paradoxes that makes this business interesting, much of its marketing and ad spend will be on search - and will go to portal rivals Google and Yahoo, which are, for the most part, happy to oblige. The New York Times writes that AOL had planned to spend up to $50 million in TV ads to promote the portal, but changed tack after noticing that the biggest source of traffic to some of its sites was from search engines. It now plans to spend more than half of its marketing budget for the portal for text ads on and search optimization.

The ads will direct consumers to particular sites within AOL, such as AOL Travel or AOL Music. The portal has "many front doors," according to AOL CEO Jonathan F. Miller, and instead of marketing the portal as a whole, AOL will promote each feature separately. The hope is that people who already use one of AOL's free services, like Instant Messenger, will try more offerings.

Both Google and Yahoo said they were happy to take AOL's money. As is it is, Google already provides search results and text ads to AOL. But Yahoo does not accept ads from direct competitors on Yahoo pages, other than those that present search results, according to a Yahoo spokeswoman.

Part of AOL's portal strategy is to find users from the more than two million people who cancel their AOL internet access subscriptions each year. When a user calls to stop service, AOL's phone representatives will offer them a way to keep their email addresses if they agree to use AOL's new free email service at AIM.com.

Miller said AOL did not need to attract many new users as long as it could persuade its110 million users of various services to spend more time on the site.