Press Release: AOL to Buy Advertising.com

Halting an Advertising.com planned effort to sell an initial public offering, AOL announced it would buy the firm outright, paying $435 million in cash. Advertising.com's media exposure to 110 million Internet users in a month would be useful to many media companies - notably not AOL - but the purchase would also give to AOL 800 advertisers and relationships with 1,500 publishers. AOL's own ad selling efforts have been marked by fits, starts, reverses and a confused internal staffing structure.