AOL‘s Q1 financials, released Wednesday morning, show the company’s quarterly revenues grew to $583 million, beating Wall Street analysts’ predictions of $578 million.
AOL Platforms CEO Bob Lord
Revenues grew 8% over the same quarter last year, marking the company’s fifth consecutive quarter of growth.
The growth comes almost entirely from AOL’s technology division, AOL Platforms, which grew a remarkable 43% over Q1 2013 and accounted for $231 million of AOL’s total revenue. By contrast, revenues from display, search and subscriptions were all down.
AOL has been investing heavily in ad tech with in-house development and a string of acquisitions, most recently buying market analytics platform Convertro for $101 million earlier this week. Driving sales forward was Adap.tv, AOL’s programmatic video and linear TV platform, which pushed third-party platform revenues up 55%.
Display revenue was hard hit by the loss of hyper-local platform Patch, which was shuttered earlier this year. The company said without losses from Patch, display revenues across its brand division, which includes properties like Huffington Post, EnGadget and AOL.com, would have remained flat.
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Despite revenue growth, AOL’s net income fell 66% to $8.7 million. Reported earnings per share were a low $0.11, thanks to $12 million in restructuring costs and a $10-million loss from capitalized software development writeoffs. AOL said without those costs, earnings would have been $0.34 per share; however, that still falls short of analyst predictions of $0.45 per share.
AOL’s paid subscriber base (which still accounts for a third of revenues) shrank—1.5%, compared to—1.9% last year. Meanwhile, consumer traffic across AOL properties grew 26%.
